An important two-hander exploring a difficult topic. It has legs, but also room to grow.
It’s difficult to write a play about a sensitive topic. The playwright must balance the need for conflict and drama with the seeking of nuance and accuracy, all while making sure the audience are neither too uncomfortable or too relaxed. falling for mostly succeeds, helped by the real-life experience of its writer, Ellie Ward.
The story centres around a relationship between Jake (Paul Graves) and Chloe (Mira Morrison), starting sweetly–a useful way to endear us to Jake–and slowly unpeeling its layers until the audience sees the painful truth: this is a relationship based on coercive control. Scenes loop as the play progresses, throwing the audience slightly off balance and reminding us there are cycles to this kind of behaviour.
The direction from Angharad Ormond aids the show’s vision well and, excuse the reviewing cliche, does a lot with a little in the confined space of the Bridge House Theatre. As Chloe moves in with Jake, a variety of lamps are unpacked and placed around the border of the space, hemming them in and helping illuminate what’s important. The sound and lighting design by Samuel Littley and Ruth Sullivan respectively only add to this effectiveness, especially via the fun shorthand of problematic pop songs like Blurred Lines. The only surprise, given all the Britney in the show, is the rejection of the (albeit obvious) choice to play Toxic.
The actors do a mostly-good job at establishing and developing the central relationship in such a short amount of time. Graves gives Jake a slightly uncanny valley feel, as if there’s something more we are not quite seeing, whereas the character of Chloe is emotional and revealing, fragile and vulnerable, in an expert turn from Morrison. There are times Graves feels disconnected from the material, and more stilted than Morrison, which is a shame given the play’s reliance on us believing and caring deeply about the relationship. Hopefully this can be put down to early-in-the-run jitters.
The development stage of a show often has moments where the target is missed. In this case, there are scenes where the movement of the actors seems unmotivated and others where the dialogue becomes clunky as it strives to be functional. It could be that a few more scenes fixes this particular fault (rare to say for a new play), and indeed the show could benefit from a longer runtime to fully allow the climax to be a culmination of its subtlety. On the nose moments like Jake’s video game analogy do work but lack depth and risk trivialising the issue. The audience are smarter than this show occasionally gives them credit for, a sentiment felt most during the choreographed movement sequence that follows a moment of shadow puppetry. One or the other might work well; both together read as indecision or, worse, condescension.
Ellie Ward deserves congratulation for bringing this important topic to an audience in a thoughtful, engaging way. falling for certainly deserves a future life, though it might require some tweaks along the way.