I didn’t really know how to feel about this classy but confusing new play by Cordelia Lynn, which re-opens the refurbished Donmar Warehouse (auditorium unchanged, but extra exposed bricks and beams, in case you were wondering).
It starts brilliantly, with a dangerously relatable and tense hook-up at a party between Him (Tom Mothersdale), a coked-up, close-talking left-wing academic and Her (Abigail Weinstock), a tightly-wound, gracious Jewish physicist whose posh flat he slags off.
This is absolutely fantastic stuff at first: menacingly funny dialogue, grippingly pitched by the two excellent lead actors on the tightest, ropiest edge of this situation, pulling on all the possibilities from sex to violence, romance, gratuitous offence... And then it all goes and wanders off into at least three other plays, none as strong as the one we started in.
First a weirdly stylised domestic violence scenario, then a ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’-ish development where the state goes fascist, then a flashback 100 years to a horrid and - on this particular stage - unearned ending where a soldier, Him, does some unspeakably brutal stuff to Her grandmother’s family in Poland: different shit, same actors, without much connection or correlation.
Lynn has a real talent for edgy dialogue and an ambitious imagination and her play is well served by tight direction from Elayce Ismail and a stark set by Basia Binkowska that looks like a graveyard of buried hopes: it’s roofed and floored by two massive, sombre wooden slabs, the bottom one fringed by dark gravelly soil and the top one descending to reveal the scene of past sins in Poland fully furnished on top of it. This is imaginative, ambitious drama that’s stimulating even if it doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts. Everyone here – the young leads, director, designer and writer – bears watching. I look forward to seeing what they do next.