Writer: Lyndsey Ruiz
Director: Sarah Majland
Mid-twenties theatre reviewer Phoebe is not impressed. The radical reworking of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata that she is asked to write up proves to be “the longest two-and-a-half hours of my life”. To be fair to Phoebe, it does sound awful. To her chagrin, Phoebe’s partner of two years, Dave, who is a fan of football, beer, and Game Of Thrones, found things to enjoy in the piece. “When was the last time you liked anything?” he asks her acidly. Gregarious Phoebe, a failed actor and wannabe writer, struggles to answer convincingly.
As is many a reviewer and their plus-one’s post-play habit, the duo soon settle down to a brutal, red wine-fuelled relationship deconstruction. ‘What did you like about the play?’ becomes 75 minutes of ‘Is there anything you like about me?’ Perhaps Phoebe has recently critiqued Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as we are very much in that territory here. Aristophanes clearly has a lot to answer for.
Writer Lyndsey Ruiz, who performs as Phoebe, has a razor-sharp eye for the stresses and strains of dysfunctional relationships and an evident talent for darkly comic dialogue: “There are different ways of being honest and I have the shitty, judgemental kind” she tells Dave (a committed, immensely likeable Boyan Petrov).
The sour, machine-gun verbal sparring between these two can be riveting, sometimes jaw-dropping, aided by obvious chemistry between the leads. Any illusions Phoebe and Dave hold about each other are stripped away, layer by layer, in exchanges that range from caustically comic to out-and-out venomous. Director Sarah Majland evokes a suitably claustrophobic psychological space in which the duo encircles and faces off, breaks up, makes up, and then recommences hostilities.
There are laughs aplenty in Tell Me You’ll Think About It to add welcome light to the shade. But momentum palls somewhat when Ruiz pauses the ding-dong to give us an overdose of explanatory backstory of the ‘do you remember when?’ type. Engineer Dave explains he wants kids because he loved his dead dad. Phoebe explains she has only completed four pages of her opus magnum because she is jealous of her over-achieving sister. Fair enough as character development, but one feels the reviewer Phoebe might at this point have written “show don’t tell” in her notes.
Ultimately, to the writer and performers’ credit, Ruiz’s characters emerge as flawed, credible people whose critiques of each other are broadly fair. Dave is as dull as she complains he is. Ditto with Phoebe’s evident selfishness. Love emerges in the space between disappointment and forgiveness, and you will root for these two. With that in mind, the odd, meta-theatrical ending to Tell Me You’ll Think About It jars awfully.
Runs until 15 March 2025
