Jesse is on her guard. She wants to know why Taylor is dropping so many “compliment bombs”. Lately, their relationship has not been like that. They have been concentrating on work, being civil, but not really connecting. Taylor can be hot-headed, but she is not big on showing affection. It would be even less like Jesse to accept the love without question.
So, in between knocking back a bottle of wine and enjoying a night of passion (not without complications), the two women engage in a skirmish for emotional territory. In this “queer love story” by Patrick Maguire, they must recalibrate. Having put behind them a chaotic past (the playwright spares us the details), they have moved into a new flat so that Taylor can focus on her work with disadvantaged children.
Their home is realised in fashionable beige on Olivia du Monceau’s simple square set, thrust close to the audience for added intimacy. The schism between them is symbolised by Jesse’s buttoned-up need for cleanliness and her partner’s domestic abandon. It is not certain that Taylor is any more stable than the young adults in her care.
That instability makes her needy and tempestuous, where Jesse is defensive and brittle. It only takes the suggestion of infidelity for them to exploit each other’s weaknesses, exposing their own vulnerabilities as they go.
They seem to know themselves uncommonly well. This is theatre as couples counselling, a series of scenes in which damage is done, mulled over, apologised for and neutralised. “The kids get the meat of your kindness and I get the fat,” complains Jesse, a line at once poetic and like something you would say after a spell in therapy.
It is all rather inward looking, a study of a self-absorbed romance that, for all its hints of life beyond their relationship, has no wider political resonance.
But intercut with reflective sequences by movement director Grace Goulding and a punchy score by local alt-rock band Crawlers, it has the emotional pull of a pop song. Jessica Meade’s production is engagingly performed by Mary Higgins and Melissa Lowe, each prepared to show their characters’ awkward corners as well as the charm we willingly invest in.
• At Everyman theatre, Liverpool, until 8 October.
