Writer: Christine Fang
Director: Haonan Wang
Christine Fang’s new play Stunted is one of the most promising works at the Camden Fringe Festival so far, a piece that could easily develop into a confident full-length piece with Fang positioning her work into an important contemporary relationship space. With tones of David Eldridge in its forensic examination of the long bond between two people that slowly implodes as the story unfolds, Stunted already has a three-act structure and a clear sense of its protagonists drifting from one another as they cling to their shared past, unable to escape the inevitable future that is pulling them apart. But in order to expand, the play needs to sharpen its focus.
Waking up on her 30th birthday, Celine (Fang) is confronted by her chirpy housemate, Max (Kenon Veno), fresh from another wild night out that she has avoided. With weeks spent at home, Max starts to suspect that his best friend is hiding something from him, and during a breakfast conversation both reveal their traumas and the ways they think their friend has let them down.
American theatre is defined by its family drama, but in recent years playwrights like Brandon Jacobs Jenkins have used friendship groups as a proxy for contemporary family life, and Fang excitingly does the same. The domestic set-up in Stunted is strong: two people who have been friends for a decade and lived together for years but who are perhaps too involved in each other’s lives, too invested in ways that make their emotional connection a burden as much as a signal of their meaning to one another. The ways that Fang depicts and tries to unravel that are hugely promising, using the symbolism of photographs jumbled together to infer the scrambling of lives that have to be untangled for Max and Celine to progress.
And for much of the play, the plot in this one-hour show offers more to the writer than this piece at the Camden People’s Theatre has time to deliver. In the first ‘act’ Celine reveals a sexual frisson with a woman, leading to a major revelation about her virginity. In essence, this is an interesting and rarely discussed topic; however, the context is not quite right. No woman who has kept such a painfully guarded secret for so long in her adult life would reveal it over breakfast to a best friend she’s never told, and much about the ensuing conversations feels like it should, instead, be a late-night confessional exchange. And Celine should have far more to say about it: the sexual pressures and hangups, the societal expectations and the way men consume women’s bodies, her deep fear of ever telling someone the truth should all be part of her psychology at this point.
Max’s revelation is far stronger, and there is some nice work on his motivation as well as on how the responsibility of that knowledge, the toll of it, wears down his friendship with Celine, who needs to escape. But the third ‘act’ feels weaker as the aftermath of their clash leads to an argument about bigotry in which Celine’s virginity in particular is used as a weapon against her. To expand Stunted to perhaps double its length, Fang can reposition the drama by using Celine’s moving out to frame a deeper conversation between the friends in which their respective stories have time to develop, their fears for themselves and each other and the pressures of living through their 20s. Here, honesty and truth can emerge as they hear each other properly for the first time in years, scattering the existing material through the conversation.
Friendship hurts, and Fang’s play has much more to say about co-dependence, love and, in long relationships, how we stop seeing each other clearly.
Runs until 17 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
