It seemed like a coup for the dinky Finborough to kick off 2019 with a new play written and directed by Ché ‘Been So Long’ Walker, featuring Olivier-winning rising star Sheila Atim.
Set in a sleazy Los Angeles of Latin American criminals and corrupt cops, lap dancers and sex workers, ‘Time is Love’ has a disappointingly aimless plot in which friends and lovers betray each other, searching in sex for something to fill the void. It needs to sizzle; Walker’s production never even catches light.
Walker’s direction is bafflingly stilted and static, actors declaiming lines out at the audience. Too many scenes feel posed rather than inhabited, with Jessica Ledon as Havana particularly struggling to breathe life into what should be a conflicted, passionate role. She’s a glamorous presence, but her hyper-femininity remains woefully disconnected from us.
Thank heavens for Atim, whose blessedly sharp portrayal of a hard-bitten lap dancer has the appropriate snap and attitude. She lifts the material whenever she’s onstage, finding a three-dimensional human within the heightened register of Walker’s dialogue. Atim also composed the soundtrack, which moves effectively between anxious metallic clatter and chimes, and ominous bass rumbles.
Benjamin Cawley and Gabriel Akuwudike are intriguing as old friends Karl and Blaz; Walker turns over their relationship in unexpected ways, revealing how love can shade into possessiveness. ‘Time is Love’ is very loosely based on 'Othello', which is best seen in Karl’s needling manipulation of Blaz’s masculine rage. Elsewhere, however, the structure is off; Serena the Sex Worker (Sasha Frost) – a classic wise ‘tart with a heart’, yawn yawn – is kind of a narrator, but she’s underused, and largely out-of-sight. There’s a lot of telling, not a lot of showing.
That goes for the design too: clunky projections spell out time and place. Blown-up video sequences repeat the scene we’re watching, sparsely lit on a bare stage, only more naturalistically. When Havana and a cop get it on, we get a dodgy bit of stylised movement – and a massive projection of tangled sheets and tossing limbs behind, as if we wouldn’t get it otherwise. It suggests a lack of faith in theatre.
While Walker writes some striking, hissing lines, and really memorable imagery – notably descriptions of sex so passionate it turns lovers into pterodactyls – the play doesn’t dig deep enough into the mythic. It feels like there’s a dark, stylised neo-noir lurking in the script, but this production comes across more like a trashy daytime soap.