Theatre review: Either

Do the box office at Hampstead Theatre keep a nightly record of how people pronounce Either when collecting their tickets, and take bets on which pronunciation will win every night? And if not, WHAT EVEN IS THE POINT OF ANYTHING?

Two consecutive trips to Hampstead Theatre wasn't exactly planned but it's not always easy to space things out in my diary, especially when a season is announced at late as this one was. Still, it makes for an interesting way to judge a new Artistic Director's mission statement to make a kind of double bill of the launch shows in both the main and studio spaces, and Either certainly suggests Roxana Silbert won't want to be left behind when theatre starts experimenting with changing ways of looking at the world. Specifically, in this instance, the changing understanding of what gender is and how it affects people's interactions: Ruby Thomas' play is about a couple, but is explicitly genderless - a stage direction projected onto Bethany Wells' set at the start insists that the two characters can and should be played by any and all genders.

It also seems to be a requirement that this remain fluid throughout, with multiple actors playing the two characters, but the choice of how to divide up the roles (which I think are called A and B, but since I don't know which is which I'm going to call by the colour-coding of their costumes,) is down to the director.

So Orange and Yellow, who had a teenage fling in the neighbourhood where they both grew up, bump into each other again while Orange is headed to Pride, and soon get into a more serious relationship. After a few months, Orange wants to keep their options open and both see other people; but while Yellow is initially upset by the suggestion, once they go ahead with it Yellow's the one who most enthusiastically embraces polyamory, to the point that it puts a strain on the relationship. Guy Jones chooses to deploy his six actors in different ways to share the two characters: Gabriel Akuwudike plays Orange for roughly half the play, replaced by Lizzy Watts at a point when the balance of power in the relationship starts shifting.

Yellow on the other hand is played by Isabella Laughland, Patrick Knowles and Tilda Wickham, with Bianca Stephens later joining them, and they swap around in the role constantly, one actor rarely playing the role for more than a few minutes straight, and occasionally all of them on stage at the same time, waiting to see which incarnation of them is best suited to respond. Where the actor change appears to mark a point of new maturity for Orange, the constant shifting of Yellow makes them come across as fluid not just in terms of gender but also in terms of being unpredictable, mercurial and open to change.

In what has been a recurring theme this month, the play is all about the way its story is told; fortunately Either falls in the same category as TICITS where the style is integral to the substance, as opposed to Amsterdam where the former drowns the latter. So if the story is a relatively straightforward one about a relationship, in which two people are overwhelmed by choices, not only as to who they can be with, but as to who they can be, having that be reflected in the way those characters are presented, ever-shifting, on stage becomes what makes it stick in the mind. Thomas’ writing is promising, with witty lines jumping out of the text regularly, but the action occasionally feels a bit choppy and unfinished, and not just in the intentional way dictated by the format.

Ironically for a play so up-to-date in its gender outlook, it also uses a slightly old-fashioned definition of polyamory – an open relationship, in which each partner can have strictly one-off, no-strings, no-emotions sex with other people. (Someone, somewhere, is currently working on the first major throuple play and let me tell you I’m ready to see who it is and which theatre is going to put it on.) Kudos, though, for avoiding the same trap Afterglow falls into of presenting that kind of arrangement as doomed to fail (the relationship is far from smooth sailing but that’s fair enough as something has to happen; but as with so much about the play, whether this is enough to ultimately end things falls into a grey area.) One thing the show has in common with Downstairs plays of the previous regime is the feeling of having reached the stage before the script was quite ready; but certainly what has made it to the stage isn’t short of interesting ideas and performances.

Either by Ruby Thomas is booking until the 26th of October at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs.

Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Robert Day.