Writer: Craig Wright
Directors: Eleanor Dunlop and Peter Todd
Crude and aggressive soccer dad Brad, who proclaims “everybody knows I’m a prick”, threatens to “take a shit” on his own dining table when his wife Beth says she is leaving him for the local pharmacist. Craig Wright’s intense, claustrophobic slice of lacerating realism, Orange Flower Water, is 70 minutes of four mostly unlikeable characters metaphorically performing that exact action on each other. It is not particularly pretty; slow-motion relationship car crashes are rarely quite as viscerally disagreeable as this. What makes Eleanor Dunlop and Peter Todd’s production of the 2003 piece so addictively watchable is four stonkingly good turns from the American cast.
It is not necessarily obvious why the church-going Beth (Emily Serdahl) finds the pharmacist, father of three, David (Samuel Greco), so alluring. He talks about air conditioning as he embraces his lover and tells her, “I want to be with you, for you, and in you, right now”, a line that really ought to see the housewife turn on her heels and flee. “My penis is asking me a lot of questions”, he confides, though he does not tell us what the questions are, or indeed the mechanics involved. For three years, the duo has been “making out in cars and bathrooms”, so one assumes they see something in each other that passes the audience by. Theirs, David tells us in an admission of entirely reasonable self-loathing, is a “love that tears everything apart”. Ain’t that the truth.
David’s wife, Cathy (a tremendous Emma Baker), watches Merchant Ivory movies, sings in a choir and thinks her 10-year marriage is going just fine. We get video clips of the couple’s early, successful, loved-up marriage, which sit rather at odds with David’s insistence that “Cathy is a mistake I made”. When Brad (T’ai Hartley) calls Cathy to tell her that her husband is cheating on her, her reaction is to try to seduce her husband away from his lover, a decision that leads to one of the most excruciating on-stage hate-fucks in the history of theatre. Will it work? Unlike many affair plays, the narrative, which unfolds in bedrooms and on the sidelines of the soccer pitch, takes us beyond the car crash and shows what happens after.
Unpleasant characters being unlikable can pall after a while, but solid direction and great actors give this production some unexpected heft. Hartley finds angsty vulnerability under Brad’s gruff exterior and nearly demolishes the set along the way. Greco’s David evinces clingy suburban self-righteousness, communicating his love for Beth as a kind of transcendent, fated event. Emily Serdahl finds genuine pathos in Beth’s slow-burning questioning of her faith in both God and her lover. The piece works because of the performances, but it is a close-run thing.
Runs until 22 February 2026
