The Stage

So This Is It…

Published Monday 17 July 2006 at 18:20 by Gerald Berkowitz

A woman brings a man home for the night only to have him then make a pass at her roommate. Over a period of years they take turns stealing him from each other - or rather, he keeps them both on the hook, marrying one and fathering a child with the other, forcing them to vacillate between bitterness and the bonds of friendship.

Leila Borris’s play has things to say about the manipulative power of the amoral man and about the women’s inability to break from their sexual or romantic thralldom. But its strongest and most moving insight is that when in pain, one’s instinct is to turn to a best friend for comfort, even when that friend was the source of the pain.

Built on a string of very short scenes presented out of chronological order, the play really says most of what it has to say in the first half-hour and can only reiterate it to decreasing effect as it lingers on. It also somewhat forces the members of the triangle into types - the sexy one, the romantic one, the manipulator - but under Samuel Miller’s direction, Lelia Borris, Kate Holbrook and Benjamin Rees-Evans go far toward creating more rounded characterisations.