Emma Thompson gives us a very personal, emotionally generous and intimate performance in this entertaining theatrical two-hander from screenwriter Katy Brand and director Sophie Hyde. Despite some moments of sentimentality and naivety, it is really watchable and conceived with a flair for commanding the audience’s attention. It’s not exactly right to call it a crowd-pleaser, but Brand – who has her own record in comedy writing and performance – has a comic’s sense of how and where to elicit an audience response.
Thompson plays Nancy, a middle-aged widow and former RE teacher who after a lifetime of unsatisfying conjugal relations with just the one man (her late husband) has decided to pay for discreet afternoon sex in an upmarket hotel room. With her brisk and schoolteacherly need for education and self-betterment, Nancy feels that she needs to experience some more sex before her death, including the most important and climactic sexual experience of all. Thompson makes her a cousin of sorts to the woman who secretly cries in the bathroom in Love Actually, because Alan Rickman is cheating on her, and to the nurse who had sex with Jeff Goldblum in The Tall Guy. Daryl McCormack (Isaiah Jesus from TV’s Peaky Blinders), enigmatically plays the young man she has hired online who goes by “Leo Grande”. Until relatively recently, “escort” was the term used if you wanted to avoid the p-word, but Leo, of course, with unselfconsciously polite professionalism, uses “sex worker”.
