A complex exploration of grief and friendship that never quite takes off
It’s late. Katie is sorting through her brother’s bedroom while a party she wasn’t invited to thumps upstairs. She’s interrupted by Roni, and what follows is a tense standoff between two old friends in a dead man’s room. Written by Zoe Hunter Gordon and directed by Sarah Stacey, 1.17am or until the words run out is an intimate depiction of grief and friendship that eventually packs a punch.
The production creates an immediate sense of atmosphere: a messy bedroom (thoughtfully designed by Mim Houghton), distant basslines and onstage smoking frame a fraught confrontation between two girls with a long, complicated history. Hunter Gordon’s knotty, fast-paced script demands a great deal from its actors. The challenge with these two-hander friendship dramas — particularly in an hour-long format — is establishing the bond between the characters before the argument takes over. Without that foundation, the audience is left watching a conflict they’re told is important without fully feeling its stakes.
Here, the connection never quite lands. The characters don’t feel fully fleshed out until the final stretch, when key details begin to click into place — but by then the play is ending. Much of Roni and Katie’s shared past relies on distant memories, and the moments of intimacy intended to offset the confrontation feel tentative and underdeveloped. There are pacing issues, too. The play opens at a pitch of high tension, with Katie immediately combative and Roni overly conciliatory. We sense significant history, but are still searching for our way in. After a long plateau, the action only truly accelerates in the final fifteen minutes — and then it’s over.
Actors Cathrine Ashdown (Katie) and Eileen Duffy (Roni) work hard with the material. Ashdown is particularly compelling, delivering a tense, childlike Katie perpetually on the brink of collapse. Duffy takes longer to define Roni, initially leaning on repetitive gestures and hesitations, but grows in clarity as the play progresses. In the closing moments she finds flashes of real beauty and defeat. Again, however, these revelations arrive just as the curtain falls.
This is frustrating because the play gestures toward genuinely interesting questions: what happens when the people we love turn out not to be who we believed they were? How does that reshape our memories of them? Can we ever return to earlier versions of our relationships — and should we want to? These themes feel richer than some of the surrounding material, including brief, underdeveloped references to class differences and controlling relationships. Ultimately, it’s a play with clear promise but an uncertain focus. I’d happily watch the final twenty minutes again.