This review is from the Edinburgh Fringe 2023. ‘Strategic Love Play’ transfers to Soho Theatre.
Miriam Battye’s ‘Strategic Love Play’ is a strikingly terse and singular dark comedy that follows the impressively chaotic first date between Archie Backhouse’s Him – a blandly pleasant everybloke who seems happy enough to autopilot his way through the night – and Letty Thomas’s Her: a sort of dating anarchist, who seems to have gone totally rogue thanks to soul-crushing over-exposure to dating cycle. She doesn’t make any effort to chit chat or flirt with Him at the pub date, but instead immediately cynically deconstructs the situation, provides biting commentary on the formulaic nature of what they’re doing, and pointedly declares herself to be ‘dank, ugly and bad’.
He is understandably taken aback by all this; indeed he is so far from able to process it that he simply keeps treating Her pleasantly, which she finds vaguely irritating but doesn’t put her off her stride. Eventually – and despite some eventual annoyance from Him – his polite bemusement persuades Her that he might at least be an ally of sorts, and they start making plans for a potential future together, cutting all the crap of the first stages of a relationship.
I’m going to be honest: I haven’t been on a first date since Gordon Brown was prime minister, and while I have been informed that ‘it’s hard out there’ re: the dating scene, I feel like it’s probable that Patie Posner’s production might click better with you if you’re ‘on the apps’. Perhaps more pertinently, I also wonder if my general lack of insight into dating from a female perspective might mean that I struggled to see some of the nuances to the character of Her.
Obviously it is a non-naturalistic play, and Her behaviour is absolutely not how anybody would possibly behave IRL. But I can see where she’s coming from: the relentless grind and transactional, repetitive nature of dating can surely do more harm than good if there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, and behind her tough, punchy exterior there are hints in the brief moments when he’s offstage that she’s sensitive and somewhat at sea. I wouldn’t say he is intended as a paragon of virtue, but he’s a nice enough guy who doesn’t run off because he simply lacks the imagination to process her behaviour, but is gradually swept up in her frank charisma and intriguing vision.
In the end, though, I struggled to really understand where the play ended up going. Having only really hinted at Her life beyond this date, the conclusion seems dependent on a more rounded comprehension of Her as a regular human being than Battye ever actually gives us. Thomas’s performance is so unnaturalistically strident that it’s hard to simply take it for granted that she has an ordinary, scared, vulnerable side underneath, even if it’s briefly hinted at. After an hour of briskly inventive sparring, the final message feel frustratingly inarticulate.