What’s a monogamist to do in the age of the swipe-right connection? In Eve Nicol’s three-hander for Middle Child, Tanya Loretta Dee’s Kat and Edward Cole’s Kit have been going steady for four years but are being stifled by a life lived online. On the one hand, they are tiring of the banality of emoticons and kitten memes, off-the-peg stand-ins for true communication. On the other, they are tempted by the multiple-choice overkill of everything, from dating apps to takeaway food delivery. When the novelty of Kit’s cute cat gifs wears thin, neither has a way to talk about it.
Herein lies a problem. Characters talking to each other is what theatre does best. But being conducted almost exclusively online, Kat and Kit’s relationship is fractured and fragmented. They speak in isolation in spoken-word monologues, giving us no sense of their chemistry or what they have to lose in venturing alone into the Hull night in search of fulfilment.
It doesn’t help that Paul Smith’s direction fails to play to the strengths of the in-the-round Roundabout stage (it felt like 15 minutes before I even saw Dee’s face). The muddy mix and impenetrable lyrics of the songs by James Frewer and Honeyblood interrupting the action only make it harder to work out what’s going on.
In the early part of the play, with Anna Mitchelson’s self-absorbed YouTube sensation MoMo circling about in her own little world, they could be talking in code or sharing a private joke. It’s only later, when the characters finally interact that we start to get a sense of who they are – and why their fate is so bleak.
- At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
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