All’s Well That Ends  – Barons Court Theatre, London

Director: Leo Băcica

Andreea Tănase’s short play, All’s Well That Ends aims to be a screwball comedy. Thirty-something Daria and Radu are staging their divorce party for us. There are some slightly awkward attempts to engage with luckless audience members in the front row: have we ever been in love, broken up etc?

But for the most part the drama circles in and out of past scenes between them. There’s a meet-cute – she a rather touchy waitress in a bar, he a goofy customer. They go out. He proposes. Given we already know how it turns out, you can guess the rest. The question of having children is briefly raised and briefly dismissed. We gather Daria doesn’t get along with her mother-in-law. But as we don’t hear anything at all about her background, we have no way of knowing whether Radu has equally intransigent in-laws. We learn each of them had ambitions to travel, but the play doesn’t explore why they don’t. We never learn what they do, what fires their imaginations, even if they have a circle of friends. More importantly, we don’t see them develop as characters.

We’re promised a ‘forensic journey’ and it could work. After all, boy meets girl and their subsequent story arc is one of literature’s evergreen plots. But for All’s Well That Ends, there’s a need for some spark, some originality, a bit of depth to the characters. Here, alas, there is none. Whole chunks of dialogue are devoted to litanies of names. The night before their wedding, Radu somewhat improbably starts to worry that their two names ‘don’t match’ and they spend a sleepless night trying to think of a better pairing. The reference to George and Martha briefly suggests a subtext: does Tănase see her play as an updated Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It’s just not in the same league. It lacks depth, insight, real darkness. Staging a brief pillow fight isn’t going to cut it. Ditto an overlong scene in which the pair down a bottle of tequila and chant possible baby names for the boy they are never going to have.

Nico Marica as Daria and Gerardo Cabal as Radu make the most of the limited material they have. There has to be a great deal of dressing and undressing on stage. The time this takes doesn’t make up for the flatness of waiting for them to do so, or for them to rearrange the minimal stage set.

Runs until 21 October 2023