A man and woman sit side by side. "Just remind me where we are," she asks. They are travelling on a train, but where? When they speak, they both use the third person, as if talking of other people. "She's strong, unafraid," claims the woman, "and she always carries brandy." But it is the man who sups the brandy, while the woman later confesses to being more fearful than she appears.
Nothing can be taken for granted in Claire MacDonald's slippery play. Her characters are elusive - storytellers whose narratives can't quite be trusted. They argue about their setting: he says there is a war on, because war gives their relationship "context"; she bristles at the "cliche". And what exactly is their relationship? There is a passionate kiss at the heart of the play, but what it suggests is bruised hearts, not blithe ones.
In synopsis, the play sounds involving; on stage, sadly, it isn't. The problem doesn't lie in Patrick Morris's elegant, evocative production, nor in the performances by Stefanie Mueller and Jeremy Killick, which communicate at once the total assurance of their characters and their damaged cores. The chief trouble is MacDonald's text, which invites an audience to read between its lines, without actually offering anything for us to discover there.
In his programme note, Morris mentions that his production was influenced by the paintings of Edward Hopper. It's an unfortunate and telling comparison. Hopper and MacDonald fill their works with tiny details, while telling us nothing concrete about the people who are their subjects. But it seems to me that while Hopper's paintings constantly open doors to the imagination, MacDonald's play - no doubt unintentionally - closes them.
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