Southwark Playhouse, London
They sit on chairs at opposite ends of a traverse stage. They could be gladiators squaring up to each other, but this man and woman are lovers. She (Vinette Robinson) is small and fragile; he (Jack Gordon) is wired and watchful. The music pounds like a wildly beating heart. They circle each other, they hurl words like hand grenades, they tear each other apart with terrible tenderness. "Your mouth ... it's such a wet thing. I could squeeze a bullet between those lips." Their sad eyes are haunted by violent desire and violent loss.
The ruin of love is often present in the very moment of its blossoming. In the first declaration of "I love you" is the possibility that one day I might not love you – that I might even hate you. In all love, there is a kind of death: the little death of orgasm, the death of the self as two become one. The death of love itself.
So it is in Philip Ridley's explosive two-hander, a frighteningly clear-eyed, viciously funny and deeply sensual examination of the way love shipwrecks us on a desert island from which there can be no rescue. It is simply and sensationally staged by David Mercatali, and performed as if its two actors feel every word simultaneously like a caress along the spine and a fist in the face.
In its examination of the violence of love and its close kinship with hate, Ridley's play is reminiscent of Coward's Private Lives; in structure, it recalls Pinter's Betrayal, which moves backwards from the end of an affair to the moment it started. There are nods towards Greek mythology, maybe The Tempest, and possibly even Strindberg's The Dance of Death. But if it is well read, it is even more well felt.
In the way it digs the loam of memory and explores how lovers create their own stories and mythologies, Ridley's play is completely and dizzyingly of itself. The writing seethes and burns. It goes not just into the bedroom, but into the mind, the secret places that we hide from everyone except lovers. Seldom has sexual love been explored on stage with such ferocious honesty, brutality and melting tenderness. Language is both a consolation and a weapon used to penetrate and castrate in 80 unflinching minutes so intimate you want to avert your eyes.