Writer: Honor Koe
Director: Benedict Esdale
The most important time of your life, or still waiting for your real life to begin? Honor Koe’s new play tries to capture the pitfalls and chasms of being in your 20s when what you want to be and how to get there, even long-term relationships, feel frustratingly out of reach. Staged as a series of punchy short scenes at the Hen & Chickens Theatre, Are We Doing This Right? still needs to determine whether plot or character is holding focus, but Koe captures the sense of existential drift that troubles the bewildered flatmates.
Two friends live together; she is an aspiring actor trying to write an attention-grabbing one-woman show that will lead to fame and awards, while he is struggling with the grind of office work as an asset manager in the city. Through a series of encounters in their living room, the housemates reveal hidden depths and aspirations, but have no idea if it will take them closer to their dream lives.
Koe’s themes certainly resonate with the uncertainty of adult life in a disconnected city, and down the decades from Friends to This Life, Industry to Queenie, there is a consistency in the experience of feeling lost, uncertain about the future and spending far more than you earn. Koe’s unnamed female character has a biographical dimension, trying to write a hit play about a young woman trying to write a hit play while spiralling between casual hook-ups with unsuitable men and peaks of enthusiasm about the future.
Are We Doing This Right? is also reaching for underlying substance as both characters fight personal demons and family issues that aren’t explored in sufficient depth. The female lead, played by Koe, is using the surface of her fast-paced and highly sensory life to conceal pain related to her father’s long-term illness, something which emerges in more detail towards the end of the show. Yet, for such a significant figure, the father remains elusive and sketchily drawn, a series of emotional impressions but never the tangible character he needs to be for the audience to invest in her pain.
The male character, played by Ned Campbell, is largely a plot device for his flatmate’s development, with little substance or a true narrative arc of his own. His role is to react, support and reflect ideas back to the protagonist, and although he is given a post-break-up subplot, the audience never gets beneath the surface of how these two people met, their friendship and how they ended up living together, why he chose high finance and the real personality that underpins the troubles he relates.
Both actors have a tendency to play their lines to the room, projecting into the middle distance instead of looking at one another, which gives the performance a disconnected quality, but there is a lot to work with here, and Koe’s subject matter has plenty of mileage. The way forward would be to build character, and the plot will eventually take care of itself – sound advice for living through your 20s as well.
Runs until 24 May 2025
