There really should be a safety warning for couples on this, the third play of the Ustinov's excellent American season.
Michael Weller's 50 Words is an incisive, insightful and, frequently, downright funny look at the damage couples inflict on each other – the emotional triggers, the hurts, the power plays that are acted out in any committed relationship.
Mostly the audience laughs knowingly in recognition of universal male-female stand-offs, and occasionally uncomfortably when the language gets a bit racy. The laughs only fall off as the damage intensifies and the hurtful home truths that come out make for increasingly challenging viewing.
50 Words features just one couple: Janine (Claire Price) and her husband Adam (Richard Clothier), who are alone one evening for the first time in nine years – the first occasion that their son Greg has gone off to a friend for a sleepover.
Adam wants to make the most of this and brings on the champagne to romance his wife. But without Greg present as a buffer the flaws in their relationship begin to split wide open.
You realise why the poor kid, who seems to spend his time hiding in nests that he makes out of piles of clothes, really just wants to become a hamster like his beloved pet.
Both Price and Clothier are excellent and absolutely believable as the intimate couple, laughing, flirting, fighting and scoring off each other's weak points. As they play emotional volleyball so too do your sympathies as a viewer, siding first with one and then with the other.
The dialogue is superb, peppered with quick-fire barbed wit – particularly from Adam – and tempered by tender moments even at the height of argument, for this play is also about love.
"There should be fifty words for it, like the Eskimos have for snow," says Janine at a point when they have laid each other bare and she is saying how much she loves Adam.
Yes, it's intense, but even at its darkest 50 Words is full of humour and the elegance with which the interplay between two people who love, hate and, above all else, know each other, is intimately observed.
It is superb in every way, and that includes a very stylish set.
Directed by Laurence Boswell, 50 Words runs until Saturday June 15. Contact the theatre on 01225 448844 for times and tickets.
JACKIE CHAPPELL
↧