Writer and director: Sam Smithson
Would you take a pill to fall in love? Not Quite Ready Productions’ Taking A Love Pill At The End of the World asks this question and more in a brilliant two-hander at Islington’s Hope Theatre.
Writer/director Sam Smithson sets the scene with two people who actively seem to hate each other. Igg (Charlotte East) is vindictive and distant, Tom (James Baxter-Derrington) is inconsiderate and infuriating. As raging fires are still a mostly distant thought, the couple are in the depths of counselling to revive a relationship that is overcome with anger and resentment.
Much of the beginning of the production is held in a bristling silence, a space where Smithson’s writer-director combination works excellently to balance the text and space. None of the cringe-inducing exaggerated shouting matches often seen in relationship plays, the unspoken seething is enough. Smithson plays with the physical space between the performers in their small kitchen (a feat on the Hope Theatre’s intimate stage) and it says just as much about the position of the couple as the text does.
The performances match this mastery, Charlotte East as Igg actually scrambles tofu on stage, and each scrape of the spoon on the non-stick pan is lacquered with feeling. East balances Igg’s anger with beautiful emotion, and it’s in perfect contrast to Baxter-Derrington’s pining and vulnerable Tom; it all makes for a beautifully compelling and honest match within Smithson’s text.
Smithson cleverly subverts expectations, the magic love pill offered to the couple is actually a medical ‘treatment’ advised by a psychiatrist, something that Igg resists and Tom begs for. The medication takes effect, but its success is wavering as the world collapses around them. Why doesn’t she leave? Why does he cling on? It’s all swept into the chemical realm of the ‘treatment’ as fires creep closer and a doomsday clock is projected onto the walls (unknown to the couple) counting down from 379 days to 14 days to 6 hours.
Smithson is able to match humanity’s fragile relationship to survive with the couple’s own, and it’s a brilliant and unique move. The couple are hilariously nonchalant about the end of the world; Tom’s report that ‘It’s raining blood through a tear in the sky, and there are demons running around’ is met with not much reaction. It’s a hugely internal existential crisis they’re holding at bay, throughout the chemicals, and the apocalypse, which, if our current response to the climate crisis is anything to go by, is a genuine depiction. Indeed, in the last hours of the earth, Tom recounts the plot of the play he’s writing, and it’s a stunning metaphor that doesn’t brag or preach.
The show is about the end of the world and love, sure, but it’s also about time, and regret, about the horrifying reality of realising you’re in stasis. It asks if there is a kind of love that prevails through hate, can it be sustained by just being present? The perfectly ambiguous ending leaves questions unanswered in the best way.
There’s a dip in energy as the final scenes stretch slightly too long. However, as the world reaches its final moments Tom notices the clocks are moving slower, perception of time changing as time itself begins to halt (‘maybe the final seconds will last an eternity?’). Perhaps then, it’s a choice.
Snappy, original, and brilliantly written. Taking A Love Pill at The End of the World is powerful stuff.
Runs until 1 June 2024
