With their audience perched on stools in a domestic kitchen, the husband-and-wife performance duo peel back the layers of a shared life – the histories they cannot separate, the private loneliness they will never share, the mutual, unspeakable horror this might be all there is.
The kitchen has been borrowed from a real-life Kemp Town family and has birthday cards on the mantelpiece, children’s drawings on the fridge, all adding to the sense of being “behind the scenes” in a relationship. Both naturalistic and intensely stylised, Milne and Nash stalk each other back and forth around the counter, finish each other’s sentences, recount slightly different versions of the same event.
Toast is crunched by way of punctuation, dressing gowns flounced, dark corners glowered in, building up the unique yet universal rhythm of a marriage. The beauty of melding two lives is nicely undercut by the inherent friction, the animal necessity of coupling juxtaposed against our intellectual repulsion to it.
This is a clever and touching piece of physical theatre that cannot fail to strike a chord.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here