The red flags are raised and waving. This queer drama from debut playwright Jess Edwards (director of Hotter and Fitter) spirals a chance encounter into an abusive relationship. Shortlisted for numerous playwriting awards, Private View reaches for a physical manifestation of entanglement theory, where two separate particles become inextricably linked. But there is little romance here. Our unnamed women wind around each other until one of them can no longer breathe, as codependence quickly gives way to coercion.
Our entangled pair are Sex Education’s Patricia Allison and The Gold’s Stefanie Martini. From their first meeting of jolting dialogue, Martini’s character – a rich, 39-year-old artist and recovering alcoholic – is intense. Off-puttingly so. Her overly sincere flirtation seems to push Allison’s character – a 23-year-old physics PhD student – away rather than pulling her close. This pattern recurs, with the surprise not in the artist’s descent into needy manipulator, but in the student’s more grounded desire to be with her.
Rightly or wrongly, queer women are said to move fast in relationships. This chaotic couple’s romance includes a midnight lab invasion to see Allison’s physicist’s quantum experiment, beautifully realised by Catja Hamilton’s pulsing lights and Josh Anio Grigg’s fizzing sound. But their actions don’t have lasting consequences. This supposedly career-threatening incident quickly falls away, taking the story’s stakes with it.
The pair play with their power dynamics in bed (and public toilets), with Annie Kershaw’s direction and Hamilton’s lights creating brief, heady moments of seduction, like the after-image of a photographer’s flash, bodies silhouetted against thick blocks of club-night colour. Here, Allison’s character grows – yet again – wary. She likes being told what to do, but doesn’t want that to extend beyond how they touch each other. For Martini’s artist, the shaky feeling of control becomes her whole world.
A stumbling attempt is made at a Stoppardian twirling of love and science, with earnest explanations of scientific theories shoehorned into conversation and laid out as grand metaphors. For London, for love, for the future. But the compression of their separate lives plays out as the pair frantically tell each other they are the same person, rather than making us feel it’s true. Private View is an aesthetically slick exploration of an unhealthy relationship, but it’s hard to really root for – or worry about – a couple you don’t believe in.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 20 December
