Tell Me You’ll Think About It. Hen & Chickens Theatre.

Mid-twenties theatre reviewer Phoebe is not impressed. The radical reworking of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata that she is asked to review proves to be “the longest two-and-a-half hours of my life”.  To be fair to Phoebe, it does sound awful. To her chagrin, Phoebe’s partner of two years, Dave, who is a fan of football, beer, and Game Of Thrones, found things to enjoy in the piece. “When was the last time you liked anything?” he asks her acidly. Gregarious Phoebe, a failed actor and wannabe writer, struggles to answer.

As is many a reviewer and their plus-one’s post-play habit, the duo soon settle down to a brutal, red wine-fuelled relationship deconstruction.  ‘What did you like about the play?’ soon becomes 75 minutes of ‘Is there anything at all you like about me?’. Perhaps Phoebe has recently critiqued Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as we are very much in that territory here. In any event, Aristophanes clearly has a lot to answer for.

Writer Lyndsey Ruiz, who performs as Phoebe, has a razor-sharp eye for the stresses and strains of dysfunctional relationships and an evident talent for darkly comic dialogue: “there are different ways of being honest and I have the shitty, judgemental kind” she tells Dave (a tremendously committed Boyan Petrov).

The sour, machine-gun verbal sparring between these two can be riveting, sometimes jaw-dropping. Any illusions they hold about each other are stripped away, layer by layer, in exchanges that range from caustically comic to out-and-out venomous.  Director Sarah Majland evokes a suitably claustrophobic psychological space in which the duo encircle and face-off, break up, make up, and then recommence hostilities.

There are laughs aplenty in Tell Me You’ll Think About It to add welcome light to the shade. But momentum palls somewhat when Ruiz pauses the ding-dong to give us an overdose of explanatory backstory of the ‘do you remember when’ type. Engineer Dave explains he wants kids of his own because he loved his dead dad. Phoebe explains she has only completed four pages of her opus magnum because she is jealous of her over-achieving sister. Fair enough as character development, but one feels the reviewer in Phoebe might have written “show, don’t tell” in her notes at this point.

Ultimately, to the writer and performers’ credit, Ruiz’s characters emerge as likeable if flawed, credible people whose critiques of each other are broadly fair. Dave is as dull as she complains he is. Ditto with Phoebe’s evident selfishness. Love emerges in the space between disappointment and forgiveness, and you will root for these two. With that in mind, the odd, meta-theatrical ending to the piece jars awfully.

Writer:  Lyndsey Ruiz

Director:  Sarah Majland

STAR RATING:  3 stars