It’s a romantic story of boy meets girl, until it isn’t. Because in ‘Graceland’, love becomes a warzone. A couple meet at a barbeque, and warm feelings of new beginning fizz under the summer air. ‘I don’t believe in love at first sight, but it feels like I’m falling,’ says Nina. Soon though, red flags rise, problems niggle their way in, and questions about the nature of long-term coupledom float to prominence. Should love really be this much of a battle? ‘Graceland’s search for an answer is messy and gradual, but compelling all the same.
Ava Wong Davies’s play tracks the evolution of a relationship from its new, shiny beginning until its bitter end. Nina, who is British-Chinese, grew up working in her family’s Chinese restaurant and is now a receptionist with ‘no ambition’. The man she meets is a poet, living off his parents’ fortune, and ships money into her account unasked. Gently and then all at once, his early signs of gaslighting, disregard and bullying warp into something more toxic and poisonous.
First, the newness of him demands space in Nina’s brain; she craves knowledge of his career history, ex-girlfriends, and family archives as if they were hard drugs. Early scenes of bliss make her tell her parents that ‘she’s never been happier’. But it is only when the play twists further into darkness that it really starts to kick into repugnant, stomach-churning motion.
Wong Davies’s script is elegantly lyrical in language and is strongest in its exploration of how the effects of being from different races or classes can reverberate into relationships. But, written in monologue form, and read by one actor (Sabrina Wu) in a largely unchanged tone, it can feel more like a plodding staged reading of a novel. It needs more galvanic drive, and more variety.
We rely on the set, then, to give the words a home on stage. A bed with a duvet is placed centre, while all around it is a sea of dirt-stained destruction. As time passes, Wu becomes progressively more smeared in the muddiness. First directed by Anna Himali Howard and then taken over in week three of rehearsal by Izzy Rabey, the picture is one of creeping damage. As Wu breaks away from monotone storytelling and into wild, innate feeling, the play grows in strength.
It’s only 75 minutes long but ten minutes could be chopped off for a tighter finish. Still, Ava Wong Davies is a writer with real flair and promise. ‘Graceland’ is a queasy but all too familiar snapshot of great romance gone wrong.