Given the survival of the species depends on it, the mating game is surprisingly hard. After so many millennia we should have cracked it by now but, as the popularity of everything from problem pages to Love Island attests, we never cease to agonise over it. In Miriam Battye’s very funny comedy, the effort, the exasperation, the unknowability of finding a partner have brought her protagonists to an impasse.
Billed as Her and Him and played, winningly, by Letty Thomas and Archie Backhouse, they have met for a date and face a depressing ritual of getting to know each other. If they finish one pint, they will have fulfilled the obligation to be polite. Two and they might even like each other.
But for Her, it is all too much. She needs to skip the niceties and just be herself. She wants Him to do the same, not least because he appears to be going out of his way to be boring. Her strategy throws him. At a loss to know the correct answers to her questions demanding the truth, he stumbles, blusters and says sorry a lot. The more he apologises, the more she is riled; the more she is riled, the more she enjoys herself.
And so it goes, in a witty and slippery exchange in which either could walk out at any moment yet something – intrigue, recklessness, fascination – causes them to stay. Performed around a revolving table on Rhys Jarman’s set, Katie Posner’s production for Paines Plough feels like watching spinning plates, now wobbling, now re-energised.
The longer this blind date maintains its equilibrium the more the couple (for they seem almost to become a couple) look like younger versions of the fiftysomething husband and wife in Eugene O’Brien’s Heaven at the Traverse theatre. From the other end of the romantic road, they face the same questions of uncertainty: how to be sure they will not be bored, unfaithful, mismatched or that some other partner would not be a better a fit? And is it worth risking all that for comfort and security?
The play ends abruptly, feeling like there should be another act – and maybe that is the point. Courtship rituals are not going to end any time soon.
At Roundabout @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August
