Francesca Baker and Jonny Davidson light up Borscht, a funny and unglamorous look at breakups in your twenties
“Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” Borrowed from When Harry Met Sally, Borscht opens its synopsis with one of cinema’s most quoted lines, one that dating coaches, twenty-somethings and the Carrie Bradshaws of the world have been quoting back at us ever since, usually while explaining why our mixed friend group is a disaster waiting to happen. It also arrives with a romcom’s promise attached. If the sex part is always going to get in the way, then the story is always going to end with two people on a rooftop, finally admitting what they’ve known since the opening credits. Joe Kirk’s play challenges that idea and asks what it takes to move on from the first breakups in your twenties.
The friendship duo David (Jonny Davidson) and Kel (Francesca Baker) are freshly out of relationships and unsure what to do with themselves. The play opens on a montage of them meeting, cardboard box in hand, warm and glossy and staged in the manner of a rom-com character development sequence. This one is meant to show how the pair met and instantly clicked, but it is unnecessary, because the very next scene has them deep into their friendship at a café, picking apart the meat of the play, and the chemistry needs no introduction. I sat there braced for the play where two heartbroken people find each other and call it healing. Thankfully, it isn’t that play.
What Kirk has written instead is a portrait of two people who are a little lost and sad at the start. They go on dates because dating is what you do after a breakup, and they go looking for closure because it sounds like the sort of thing a healthy person would want. What they avoid, with impressive commitment, is the one thing that would help, which is looking honestly at their own behaviour in the relationships they have just left. The closure ritual at the centre of the play is a bowl of borscht, a soup, which is somehow both absurd and painfully believable.
Everything rests on the two leads, and Baker and Davidson are more than up to it. Their chemistry can’t be rehearsed into existence, so when Kel and David settle in at a coffee shop to dissect their week, you believe they have known each other for years. The timing is sharp and the humour never feels forced: watching them, it is easy to forget you are watching actors at all.
A single table can split into two smaller ones, surrounded by two chairs, and a cardboard box sits in each corner for each character’s props and personal effects. That is more or less the whole set. When David and Kel go on their separate dates, the tables move side by side and the pair take turns responding to their dates, so the audience is following two conversations at once. It should be confusing but Kirk’s writing and direction keep both threads clear, and the effect is oddly intimate, like overhearing two friends compare notes on the same evening.
Borscht is a sharp, funny debut of a night out and it knows exactly who it is for. Baker and Davidson make that journey a pleasure to watch and the writing stays quick and unforced. For anyone who has ever mistaken a distraction for closure, it is well worth your evening.
Borscht runs at The Bread and Roses Theatre, London until Saturday 19th September.