18 – 22 November 2025

This is what we might call an enigmatic play, at least in the production offered to us by director Janine Wunsche. Casting around I found myself at various points musing as to whether it was perhaps a play about love pure and simple, or maybe the male versus female power dynamic, or again whether some style of creepy sex offender was under the playwright’s magnifying glass. One with a genetic or family disposition to lure women to a remote riverside shack for a spot of sea trout fishing and a tumble in the sack. Quite what the seduction process might have been is a matter of bemused speculation as the play begins in medias res with The Man – as he is styled – (Ciaran Corsar) in the process of entertaining what we later learn is one of a number of..’subjects’, shall we call them politely.

The pace, perhaps in keeping with the leisurely riverside retreat setting, is slow and meandering. The style is distinctly poetic, self-consciously so I thought and therein lies what I took to be a fault in the production. In foregrounding the well-turned phrases the grit or oil in the relationships takes second place. The language is given most of the work whilst the interactions between the characters are left to fend for themselves. Bluntly, there was little in the way of chemistry between The Man and either The Woman (Claire Bowman) or The Other Woman (Susie Kimnell). I confess to scratching my head to see what either woman found seductive enough about him to commit to a weekend or longer, away in a remote love shack.

The way that the women’s episodes flowed seamlessly from one into the other suggested not so much a yearning to recapture something lost on the part of The Man, or a search for an ideal, as a well-rehearsed formula of seduction. That being so might explain why his heart did not seem to be in it in either case. The dark turn comes with the revelation of the scratched out faces of the portraits that hints at a psychological trauma which seems to be related to his grandfather’s use of the shack to get his ‘wicked way’. Both women (a third makes a brief appearance) showed enough pluck and nous to see through the charade and I was relieved that my worst fears about their potential impending fates were confounded when they each made successful, unchallenged exits.

The play meanders happily enough, but is in want of any engaging emotional rapids.

★★★☆☆  Graham Wyles,  19th November 2025

Photography credit:  Jordan Davies