Review: Private View, Soho Theatre

Soho Theatre always holds a vibrant city energy and is a terrific space for Jess Edwards’s debut play Private View, shortlisted for the international Yale Drama Series Prize, the Women’s Prize for Playwriting, and set in London.

Sex Education’s Patricia Allison and The Gold’s Stefanie Martini play two unnamed women who meet on a chance encounter at an art exhibition, and move from queer rom-com to abusive relationship in a runtime of 70 minutes.

Martini’s character, the “queen of luxi stuff”, makes work out of light, creating “cages of light” which becomes a metaphor for the feeling of being trapped. Light and darkness play an important element, underpinning the theories as well as creating blackout spaces for place, time and connection.

The powerplay rapidly begins between a 23 year old PhD student and a 39 year old artist: one working hard and reliant on funding and the other a rich recovering alcoholic still grieving for her father. Their opening exchanges are smart and playful, using choreographed movement to navigate their intimate and public spaces and their sex play in both. The actors, particularly Allison, are comfortable and confident on stage and their physically intimate exchanges feel safely conceived. Their moments of seduction are well created by director Annie Kershaw and intimacy director Ingrid Mackinnon.

Kershaw presents the narrative like the series of successful ‘photograms’ that has made the older character successful. Use of screens with sharp sounds and flashes of neon colour holds this metaphor well, visually enabling the narrative to burst from one screen to another. Flashes of silhouette into clubbing red when the flags appear to the reoccurring soundtrack of Donna summer’s ‘I Feel Love’all add to the sexual tension and menace. Catja Hamilton ‘s lighting design is integral when the pair break into a lab and undergo a quantum experiment that detonates pulsing pink lights and sharp sizzling sound. Plotwise, this is a moment of high stakes action to set up tension only to be seemingly resolved in a scene change and dissipated.

Likewise, Einstein’s phrase of “spooky action at a distance” runs through the play, with the pace going at the speed of light and the two women colliding, separating and coming back together like the theorised entangled particles.

The visually slick aesthetic, with immaculate costume choices and mesmeric silhouette portraiture, is enjoyable. Race, micro aggressions, ageism, classism, entitlement and privilege are all floating particles and the play never really gets beneath the surface of these two women in an unhealthy relationship. Science and love both garner either heartfelt and laboured, studious explanations of theory or the quoting of Yeats, yet feel placed in their conversations rather than real moments of romance or debate. Often we are told rather than shown moments of their journey, which makes it difficult to care.

However, the love bombing and the patterns of coercive and abuse behaviours are there and sequenced as the dependency intensifies. The trauma response and a spectrum of nuanced behaviours from both characters is recognisable – from love to violence to reconciliation to argument. Abusive relationships are not clean so Allison’s character has found a desire to be with her coercive partner despite the manipulation, climaxing when she refuses to be publicly viewed as an art exhibit. So amidst the word play and stylishly choreographed duet there are moments when the audience can care for both individuals and them as a couple. Just not enough.

Private View offers much to enjoy, exploring queer love, art, science and coercive control in an entangled relationship that often lands and sometimes feels aesthetically placed. It is beautifully produced; our connection just doesn’t burn deep enough.

Written by Jess Edwards
Directed by Annie Kershaw
Set and Costume Design by Georgia Wilmot
Lighting Design by Catja Hamilton
Sound Design by Josh Anio Grigg
Casting by Jacob Sparrow
Movement and Intimacy by Ingrid Mackinnon
Produced by Speakerphone Productions

Private View plays at Soho Theatre until Saturday 20 December