What kind of mix-up results in two strangers moving into the same flat on the same day, each believing it to be theirs alone? Writer Peter Souter doesn’t seem to know, nor to care: once he has brought his protagonists together, the premise for their collision discreetly evaporates. Souter’s interest is in the first hour of this pair’s relationship (Act One) and the last (Act Two), hence the title.
    
It’s fairly schematic. At first Juliet is arrogant and self-dramatising, Alex stoical and nerdish, and in classic tradition their verbal sparring suddenly magicks into a full-on snog. At the end, as they divide up their belongings, she is sadder and wiser, he has gained in self-insight but also in reticence. Each act contains one other character: before the interval, Juliet’s ex-boyfriend decides not to oblige her by toughing Alex up, whilst afterwards the woman who helps him move his boxes turns out not to be his “new popsie”, as Juliet puts it.
    
This is Souter’s first stage play after a career writing for television and radio, and to say that it looks like it would be glib but not inaccurate. It is concerned only with the amusement of the moment, whether that amusement be of the chuckly or the sobby variety. There is no weight to the piece, not even the emotional substance it aims for; if an over-reacting spectator were to tearfully blow their nose, they would blow the play away as well.
    
Director Tamara Harvey, normally reliable at doctoring weak plays with deceptively stronger productions, for once fails to get much out of her cast. Shaun Evans is plausibly restrained as Alex, but not much range is required of him. The surprise is Miranda Raison, who surely knows better than the superficial operatics of her Juliet in Act One. Yes, this is Juliet’s temperament, but it looks as if Raison is doing this shouty singsong by nature rather than in calculation; Juliet may have had ten years or so to grow more sober for Act Two, but there has been no groundwork laid in Raison’s performance for this maturing. On its move into Hampstead’s main house from the downstairs try-out space, this play feels simply over-exposed.
    
Written for the Financial Times.