Review: Strategic Love Play, LAMDA

At LAMDA’s Carne Theatre, director Dhruv Ravi takes on Strategic Love Play, a new play by Miriam Battye. It follows a date between Man or Adam (Emmanuel Olusanya) and Woman or Jenny (Amber Grappy), arranged through an app, that goes… very strangely. The play feels distinctly of the moment: its characters are scarily real, it’s funny, and it’s always buoyed by a tension that reveals the evening for what it really is — a horror show. The stage is set like a pub, in the round, with several tables surrounding the table where the couple is seated. My plus-one and I are given one of them. It’s immersive and very close.

Adam just wants a normal evening. Jenny is a massive spanner in the works. She manipulates him relentlessly — instigating arguments, dragging him into intense conversations, oscillating between flirtation and tears — until she finally runs off after an emotional crash, exhausted by herself. While the play could be read as two complex characters navigating an awkward date, Jenny is always one step ahead, exploiting Adam’s desire to say and do the right thing. He begins the evening half-committed, jacket still hanging on his shoulder, and by the end is left alone, crying from shock before laughing as realisation hits that the nightmare is over.

Grappy brings Jenny’s overwhelming dominance to life with total commitment. What initially comes across as overacting soon clarifies into a character who treats life like a poem or a play, desperate to manufacture a “moment.” We learn little about Jenny’s life, yet her behaviour is entirely legible: a fantasist prone to poetic, self-victimising monologues, longing for intimacy without the capacity to sustain it. Her attempts to create a dark, cinematic romance spiral beyond her control, so that in the end she frightens herself, and once her emotional fuel is spent, she shuts off completely.

Opposite her, Olusanya is the perfect likeable, awkward antidote. His terrified reactions earn early laughs, grounding the play in recognisable discomfort and counterbalancing Jenny’s volatility. We learn far more about his life than we do hers: a girlfriend who left, and a best friend he might have been in a relationship with, had he not sent a disturbing drunken voice note. In many ways, the play is really about him, with Jenny a whirlwind he narrowly avoids being pulled into. He is alone before she arrives, and still there once she is gone; briefly enthralled, then left standing as the vortex passes.

This is a situation that could only exist in the age of dating apps: a cold open with no shared history, no gradual reading of temperament, no social context to soften the encounter, just two strangers with their own expectations of what a first date will be like.

Ravi and his team build an impressive rollercoaster from a table, two chairs, and two people. Ghoti Fisher’s fluctuating lighting makes the emotional shifts vividly palpable; by the end, spotlights isolate each table, including the one where Adam is left alone. Veila De Nicola’s subtle sound design, distant noise and understated music bleed into the scene, heightening the intensity and quietly reminding us of the walls around the date and the world continuing just beyond it.

In this dark dating tale that rings uncomfortably true, audiences will recognise the awkwardness, the anxiety and the craving for stability. When Jenny talks about wanting a “badge” to confirm she’s in a relationship, and Adam eagerly replies, “I want a badge too!”, the room erupts. But the play’s message is clear: a relationship is not a badge, or an anchor, or a stable structure, but is made from people, each with their own problems and circumstances, working within their limits.

Directed by Dhruv Ravi
Movement and intimacy director: Kim Wright
Produced and costume design by Enza Kim
Lighting design by Ghoti Fisher
Sound design by Veila De Nicola

Strategic Love Play is at LAMDA’s Carne Theatre until Sunday 11 January.