“We are still ourselves when we lie.” Unfaithful is made up of ingenious perceptions, arresting lines and some over-explanatory dialogue. It is given a production by Adam Penford that has the hallmarks of Found111, where it is proving impossible to have a bad evening.
Rammed up on either side of the stage, the audience seem to be pushing the action along. Richard Kent’s design is plain and compact: mirrors, a double bed with a crisp white counterpane, a rudimentary bar. Actors shift it around between scenes, as they unzip or button each other up into new costumes. The world spins around sex and drink. The evening is galvanised by Niamh Cusack. As a wife who uses outrage and disappointment to work herself back into feeling, she rockets into another dimension of acting.
Owen McCafferty’s play, first seen at the Edinburgh festival two years ago, is shaped on a daisy-chain principle. Almost. Two couples – one in their 50s, one in their 20s – are linked together by sexual encounters. Apparently. The younger woman gangles up to the older man in a bar. Her boyfriend, who works for an escort agency, has an assignment in a hotel with the man’s wife. Yet what really binds these four together is more subtle. They are emotional osteopaths. They lever themselves into pleasure through pain. They tell stories – well, what writers call fiction and everyone else calls lies – in order to reach into the far corners of themselves, those parts that their lives have not yet penetrated.
Ruta Gedmintas, in the underwritten part of the young woman, is appealing but blank. In a script that veers between the clever and the clumping, she has some silly lines to deliver, not least one about masturbation being something you do “for yourself”. As her fella, Matthew Lewis, sprung from being Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter movies, has a well-judged, impenetrable insouciance.
Yet the real interest lies with the more mature couple. Sean Campion is the husband (much is made of him being a plumber) who can’t bring himself to say that he has not been unfaithful. He is very fine: measured and muted. Cusack is on fire. She spits contempt: “The way,” she complains to her husband, “you say something then your nostrils open up.” She lashes herself into excitement with a stream of abuse. It’s a fully physical performance. Her body corkscrews with indignation, betrays embarrassment with swagger and strut. She is helped by having many of the best lines. On her husband’s supposed infidelity: “I feel I’ve been cheated – not cheated on – but cheated of.” Robbed of time.
