Some love stories end with strawberries on a beach
There is a specific kind of afternoon that belongs only to best friends: sun-slow, consequence-free, rich with nothing happening and so thoroughly insulated from the rest of life that it might as well exist in a separate dimension. Agnelle Groombridge’s new work catches that moment, and the fact that it does so in under forty minutes with two performers, two towels, and a fan, speaks well of what the piece is already doing right.
Sydney and Sarah arrive already mid-laze on the Plage de la Baie des Fourmis, novels open, sunglasses on, the whole architecture of a perfect beach day arranged around them before the audience had a chance to settle into their seats. One wears a maillot and capris; the other, a cropped blue top and denim, coordinated in the unspoken way of people who stopped needing to discuss it years ago. Their dynamic, teasing, tender and occasionally exasperated, establishes itself within minutes with confidence and what follows is the kind of afternoon that will feel embarrassingly familiar to any best friends who have ever spent one doing exactly this: sharing a batch of strawberries, watching men, fantasising freely, talking about raising children together someday and waiting for someone whose face keeps dissolving into other faces. The Beckett reference in the publicity material is not accidental.
Paulina Kehlet Schou and Olivia Michi Shrenzel are both excellent with the ease of performers who actually seem to like each other rather than merely playing at it, and there are several exchanges that feel genuinely overheard rather than performed, which is, as anyone who has ever tried to write the texture of female friendship will tell you, the hardest thing in the world to fake. This is banter that lands because it knows its own history, shorthand that works because it hasn’t been written to explain itself, and the result is something that locates the particular, almost embarrassing intimacy of a friendship in which everything has already been said and you’re both just enjoying the echo.
What the piece wants, though, is the courage to follow its own threads further than comfort currently allows. The fires burning across southern France are invoked and then left smouldering at the edges of the conversation; the French setting, specific enough to name in the programme notes, barely surfaces in the text itself, which is a missed opportunity for texture and strangeness when the production is otherwise so committed to its atmosphere. Sydney’s crush, a structuring obsession through much of the play, generates some of its best and most recognisable sparring, but lingers slightly too long before the friendship reasserts itself as the actual subject – and the architecture of where it’s heading is felt before it gets there, which is the particular frustration of watching something with promise find its feet in public.
This is the limitation of “work in progress” as a format as the potential is visible enough that the gaps feel larger than they might in a finished piece. The foundations are solid and the play knows what it is about, it simply hasn’t quite decided how much it wants to say, or how. A short film is apparently in the works, and the case for it makes itself: the ocean soundscape, the late-afternoon heat, the texture of that specific sun-drenched stasis – all of it translates. If the finished version is as warm and as canny about the strange, sustaining alchemy of female friendship as this draft promises, it will be worth the wait.
The Beach Is A Place For Looking’s run at Playhouse East, London, for the Work In Progress Festival has now concluded.