Elena is swinging by her ex Nick’s flat to pick up an old camera. What are the odds that these two people, who haven’t seen each other for a few years, will end up reflecting on old times and dissecting every little thing that tore them apart?

Joking aside, the premise of The Edit may be familiar but delving into broken relationships is a popular tract for playwrights simply because it facilitates the exploration of a lot of complex emotions and a lot of messy social structures. There is of course an extreme intimacy and, simultaneously, a near insurmountable distance between former lovers.

A lot of effort has gone into the minutiae of the characters and making their travails believable and relatable. Meghan Treadway (Elena) and Jamie Wilkes (Nick) give incredibly naturalised performances, steadily peeling away their unease at this reunion, and oscillating between overexposing their emotions and hastily trying to recover themselves. Even outside of the well-observed relationship dynamic, writer Sarah Gordon establishes the smaller aspects that have fed into and complicated Nick and Elena’s romance: financial insecurity and debt, unsatisfying housing conditions, career malaise, and existential uncertainty.

The nature of this two-hander is very well suited to an intimate studio theatre like the Irving. Much of the detailed physical performance would be lost in an expansive auditorium. You need to be able to see Nick’s evasive eye movements, Elena’s tension and acute recoil whenever he makes a rapid movement: all these things become key to establishing the baseline of their prior relationship so it can be dug into.

Like many plays that tear into the nitty gritty of old lovers’ grievances, there does come a point in The Edit where the dredging up of old wounds and the neat ascending arc of the shouting match does become slightly performative or lays bare its construction. In this case, the eagerness in the second half of Nick and Elena to poignantly pinpoint each other’s neuroses is a little too exact. You could argue that this is reflective of people who have known each other so well that they are deeply familiar with these flaws, but they worked a little better as the subtly demonstrated subtext of their relationship rather than traits which are simply told to the audience.

The Edit being too precisely structured that it sacrifices a degree or two of naturalism to deliver a satisfying apotheosis is damning with faint praise, clearly. This was an engaging and emotional play that was tightly focussed on its subject matter and carried by a pair of talented actors. What more could you ask for?    ★★★★☆    Fenton Coulthurst    17^th May 2019