Does a revival of Sam Steiner’s 2015 fringe sensation about a state-imposed “hush law” which limits our spoken word count resonate differently today, and on a West End stage? For some in our age of 24/7 online over-sharing, more quietude might sound like a utopia rather than the dystopia it is here, although the play is as much about resistance as it is about language.
This brave new world of 140 daily spoken words, at most, is refracted through a couple navigating love and intimacy and Josie Rourke’s production is driven by a starry duo in Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner. She is Bernadette, a divorce lawyer with a working-class chip; he is Oliver, a musician with family privilege and a fragile ego. With a play that rose from the fringe circuit, Rourke’s great accomplishment here is that it looks fit for a West End stage, despite being a prop-free two-hander, while retaining its breezy minimalism.
