Two terminally shy people interact through a baby monitor, but what happens when their tentative romance leaks out into the real world?Rating
Good
‘This is a true story,’ Jonah (Joe Pitts) tells us. ‘This is a love story. This is our love story.’ And so it is, but it’s a far from conventional one.
Jonah was brought up on a farm – or, as he explains, a self-sufficient religious commune. After his mother dies of pancreatic cancer she leaves him a large sum of money, buried in a suitcase at the back of the farm. He decides to leave the commune and seek a new life in London. There he secures a ground floor flat in a house owned by Sophie (Abigail Thorn), who lived there with her father while nursing him through – coincidentally – pancreatic cancer. She installed a baby monitor so she could keep an eye on him. When he died, he left her the house.
Sophie and Jonah have strong shared experiences, but they’re both terminally shy. After her father’s death Abigail is made redundant from her job as an account manager in a software company, in an excruciating interview with Pitts’ deputy personnel manager, a person with a total lack of empathy, who explains that Sophie ‘lacks visibility’.
Jonah has never met Sophie, as he got the flat through an agent; so when she sends him the baby monitor in the post, he has no idea where it came from. He watches first tentatively, then compulsively, as Sophie goes about her daily routines. Only when she drops a heavy box does he realise that the object of his scrutiny lives upstairs. He takes to following her as she goes first to the local shops, then on longer trips through London: she knows he’s there, complicit in taking him on excursions, but they never acknowledge each others’ presence. Until, that is, the event that finally brings them together.
It’s a curious, touching and emotional play, exploring how we live our lives vicariously through the experiences of others. A lot goes unanswered: they live their solitary lives in parallel, watching the same TV shows and eating at the same time, but how does she know he’s doing the same? Why does she pretend not to know he’s following her?
Emily Bestow’s at times ingenious set consists of a series of shiny black boxes on a shiny black floor, the only furniture being a perspex sofa on a raised dais. Ten video screens of varying size both set each scene and provide oblique glimpses into the characters’ emotional states.
Phil Porter’s script is witty and intimate, but at times its deliberate obscurity hampers its study of loneliness and grief. When Jonah at last asks Sophie why she sent the baby monitor, her only explanation is ‘Because I thought it might feel good.’ It’s a key question, and it’s disappointing that it goes unanswered.
Written by Phil Porter
Directed by Simon Paris
Set and costume design by Emily Bestow
Blink plays at The King’s Head Theatre until 22 March.
