SEX WITH A STRANGER
Trafalgar Studio 2, London SW1
Opened 6 February, 2012
***

One regularly sees some stage writing referred to critically as “televisual”. This usually means that it consists of a large number of short, discrete scenes with little sense either of the particular momentum of live drama or of the logistics of scene-changing and so on. Stefan Golaszewski’s third play (and his first not to be a self-performed solo) is televisual in this sense, but even more so in the kind of gaze it directs, and makes us direct, on its characters.
    
When we watch Adam and Grace on the way back to her place for the titular act, with flashbacks to their getting together at a club, we see their complete absence of anything in common. There’s not even any attraction there: after their first frantic snog, each wipes their mouth. But when the unremitting inanity of their conversation (just to be saying anything to fill the void) is used for comedy, I felt that the press-night audience was laughing less out of recognition than a kind of anthropological slumming: not “Gosh, we do that too (or used to)”, but “Oh, how different this is from what we do (or ever did, honest)”. It is not a pleasant response in a live audience, whereas the more distanced and dispassionate eye of television is much more accommodating of this kind of attitude in the privacy of one’s home. Golaszewski then shows us, with similar chronological non-linearity, Adam’s relationship with Ruth (mildly jealous, mildly insecure, generally mild), whom he is betraying in his fling with Grace. This phase is intended to modulate, subvert and complicate our responses to the Grace scenes, but it is conversely too successful at reproducing televisual dispassion onstage. In some ways the most outstanding scene is one that would be TV suicide: silently, wordlessly and quite undramatically, Ruth spends some minutes ironing the shirt that Adam will wear to go out and two-time her.
    
Phillip Breen directs with a jeweller’s eye for telling detail, and Russell Tovey (star of Golaszewski’s TV series Him And Her), Jaime Winstone as Grace and Naomi Sheldon as Ruth all give finely judged performances (especially their thoughtful looks into space), perfectly pitched for the smaller Trafalgar venue. But the essence and perspective of the piece itself is less Trafalgar Two than BBC Three.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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