We enter this drama in the middle of a conversation rather than its start. A couple are meeting for a coffee – it’s a reunion, of sorts. John (David Sturzaker) flirts and flatters. Aga (Olivia Le Andersen) deflects his advances. He lives in a six-bedroom home with his wife and family. She is an immigrant with an eastern European accent who worries about paying the bills and feeding her children. Is she, we wonder, his lover or his cleaner – or both?
There is initial, deliberate discombobulation in Magdalena Miecznicka’s script, which builds its delicious, satirical-yet-serious drama around the power play, and power disparities, within this adulterous ex-relationship.
Under Alice Hamilton’s sharp direction, we learn that they were both married when they had their affair. Her marriage imploded, leaving her penniless, while he vanished in order to protect himself and his privileged home life.
There is nothing on Sarah Beaton’s blank white box of a stage to distract us from their reckoning apart from two plastic chairs and a splash of colour on a back screen, which changes to mirror the mood, from blushing pink to icy green.
This is the aftermath of the affair, with both musing on motivations, and it might be a version of Before Sunset until the blackmail sets in: she wants recompense for the affair’s devastating effect on her life.
John is an unremorseful cheater and narcissist, sentimentalising their affair while Aga feels only its pain. He speaks of loving his wife, Cecelia (one too many times), but like any narcissist, he does not feel loved enough by her. Although we never meet Cecelia, there is a whiff of F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy about this entitled Hampstead couple who stamp on other people for sport, it seems, and move on.
As a dialogue between impoverished ex-mistress and wealthy former lover, their social disparities are perhaps a little too broad-brush, but their conversation still bears enough truth to prickle and infuriate. The gulf between them reflects the way in which affluence rubs up so intimately with poverty in metropolises like London.
Some questions around adultery and passion are briefly explored: what kind of “love” fuels adultery? Can an affair of this kind ever serve both parties equally, or will it always end up exploiting one side? Both actors give good, cool performances in a crisp production, which, at just an hour, leaves its questions needling in your mind.
At Hampstead theatre, London, until 9 December
