It's a timely, loaded premise: two American college students have drunken sex. She thinks it was rape; he doesn’t. It should make for incendiary drama but Anna Ziegler’s wordy two-hander is doused by too much exposition.
We begin at the heart of the action: the night in question, when Princeton students Amber and Tom meet up at a party. They’ve already had one date and she was keener to follow up than him. She wants to dance but he just wants to go back to the dorm. There, they have sex; she’s so drunk she throws up. But did she ever say “No”? No, she said “actually...”
The play starts promisingly, flitting between the night in question and the aftermath, including the fallout from a subsequent hearing. Actors Yasmin Paige and Simon Manyonda are excellent at subtly conveying the way they are drawn to each other, without it tipping over into full-blown sexual chemistry.
But before long there’s no action — it’s just Amber and Tom telling us how they felt about everything. She felt pressured by her friends to report their night as rape; he feels her accusation is racist. Ziegler wants to suggest that in a “he said she said” discourse multiple things can be true at once but her writing is constrained by its static form.
On a topic riven by anxiety and subjectivity, we’re not offered the chance to do much more than take these characters at face value.
Until Aug 31
