It doesn’t look like much: the stage is tiny, the set is a single room, spare and compact, and there are only two characters, Him and Her. Yet writer-director dkfash makes By Their Fruits feel deep and dense, and wide and open – as if reaching into the ground beneath and the sky above that central relationship.
Him and Her (winningly played by Ivan Oyik and Reba Ayi-Sobsa) are quite a pair, taking swipes at each other and making up, enjoying then falling out over the games they play – not in a toxic, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf way, but with heart and soul and humour. And body too: their language is as much physical as verbal, full of stances and glances, their touches, swerves, brush-offs and embraces enforcing or contradicting the words they speak. The action is often freewheelingly funny, and sexy too (they may argue a lot, but they’re definitely hot for each other). It’s as if dkfash observes all these dynamics with the benevolent, non-judgmental eye of a couples therapist, even as she scripts them with the relish of a drama director.
