No play about language is ever just that. But South African Craig Higginson's clever two-hander about a beautiful young English teacher and her French-Congolese pupil takes on everything from racial and class animus to truth versus fiction and the dark heart of desire.
Pierre (Clifford Samuel) is a penniless art student who claims he's here to learn to express himself. Celia (Fiona Button) is a poor little rich girl seeking distraction from the family phone calls that buzz unanswered through their lessons in her tasteful Paris pad.
While his enterprising sentences bubble with enthusiasm, she manages language with the same cold precision as
her breakfast banana. But the power play and eroticism here won't be divided so cleanly into 'subject' and 'object'.
In rhythm with a wilting vase of daffodils, the romantic comedy gets progressively more raw across five grammar-themed scenes, and there are echoes of Desdemona and Othello in Celia's hunger for stories (though maybe not in the bit with the foot rub). But despite two brilliantly human performances, the whole feels, like both Pierre's childhood and the bright vision of Celia he has pursued through the streets, just a little too constructed.