The first offering uploaded to the Festival's YouTube channel was the play 'Either' by Ruby Thomas.
On the surface, this play is about relationships: love, sex, friendship and all the other stuff that relationships are made from, but perhaps it is a little more than just that. Directed by Alice Croft we are presented with a young couple who bump into each other quite by chance on a busy street during Pride, and they recognise each other from 10 years' earlier. There is the usual awkward small talk, but it becomes obvious that they were more than just platonic friends all those years ago, despite him not being able to remember her name.
Where this play then diverts from the ordinary and the expected, is that this same conversation is taken up by a completely different couple, and then to another couple and finally to a fourth couple; each couple continuing the conversation and we are led to believe that perhaps they truly are the same people. Although when one couple are both female and one couple are both male, perhaps again there is more to it than at first meets the eye.
The story goes through the good times they shared and the bad... through therapy sessions and free sex; through discussions over tattooes to one of the pair's father dying.
Overall the play is too long. It is quite a nice idea, but would undoubtedly have worked better on a stage. In the current situation, perhaps asking the writer to have adapted the play for Zoom chats in isolation would have been preferable. It would have given the play more realism, and would not have altered the story in any way. losing none of the themes or realationships.
Reviewer - Chris Benchley
on - 1/7/20
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