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.