8 – 12 February

There is a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song titled, Love the One You’re With, which suggests, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”.  James Dearden’s play-of-the-film gives a deliciously dark irony to that call from the age of sexual liberation.

Played out as the regretful reminiscence of a one-night stand that went horribly wrong the play’s core is simplicity itself. A young, married man, comfortably settled into family life, is offered an away-day of sexual excitement from an attractive pick-up in a bar. The ‘pick-up’, however is a reversal of the usual scenario since the man, Dan, is picked up by the irresistibly attractive, Alex. The adage, ‘If something seems too good to be true, it probably is’, carries about as much weight as advice to wear water wings  has to an experienced swimmer when a man under the influence of hormones is offered sex on a plate. Similarly the truism that all actions have consequences is equally as useful after the event, when the action has already come back to poke him in the eye.

The femme fatale, Alex (Kym Marsh) suggests a risk free liaison, seemingly setting out the rules when she asks if he, Dan (Oliver Farnworth) is discrete. However after a second helping of forbidden delights he soon becomes aware that she is in fact playing by different rules.

Ms Marsh gives Alex all the attributes that make her irresistible: the easy touching, constant preening and flicking of her hair and a seeming effortless flattery. Her rapid transition into a psychopathic vamp is done with a deft sleight of hand, which briefly gives her the appearance of being a victim before it becomes evident that she is disturbingly unhinged.

Director, Loveday Ingram, without access to the tools of suspense available in the cinema takes a different tack, and in a scene where Alex, under some business pretext barges into Dan’s office, has the office workers (raised on a gantry) look down disapprovingly at the relationship. This gives the play a social as well as a personal dimension.

The finger-wagging, concluding coda in which the original bar scene is re-run, but with Dan offering a polite refusal to Alex’s advance, is, given what has gone before, a bit of fatuous moralizing and in a way points up the play’s weakness, which is an insufficient examination of any of the characters. In short the play is what it is, a story about an adulterous sexual encounter that has disastrous consequences that flow in part from the emotional instability of one of the protagonists. So one is left with two possible lessons; ‘don’t’ or alternatively, ‘before you put your hand in the cookie jar check the contents.’

★★★☆☆ Graham Wyles  9th February