Aidan Turner and Jenna Coleman
(Picture: Johan Persson)Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner add glamour and heft to Sam Steiner’s cultish 2015 fringe hit about language, that’s now vaulted into the West End. They play divorce lawyer Bernadette and musician Oliver, newly cohabiting when the government decides – for unexplained but presumably repressive reasons – to limit its citizens to 140 words of speech a day.
This slight, absurd concept, inspired by Twitter’s character-count and clearly unworkable in any practical sense, proves a surprisingly flexible metaphor for the restriction of liberty. It also enables Steiner to explore how people spar, hedge and evade in everyday conversation.
