Sam Steiner’s two-hander, originally performed at Warwick Arts Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival in 2015 when the author was 21, is now surprisingly in the West End.
Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner make it commercially viable. They are engaging actors. They have chemistry and are well directed by Josie Rourke.
You may have seen Coleman in Doctor Who and Aidan Turner in Poldark and The Suspect.
Steiner has an Orwellian theme. The government passes a new law, which rations language and inroads on freedom of speech. Everybody is limited to only 140 words of speech a day.
There are just two characters on a bare stage, no furniture, no props, no change of costume, just a huge backdrop of everyday items and a change of position and a change of lighting. The play lasts 95-minutes and is acted straight through without an interval.
The scenes are incredibly short, hardly sentences, just a few cryptic words. The couple shout out numbers which refer to the number of words they have left when they come home from the workplace.
The couple are a divorce lawyer and a songwriter in a 6-year rom-com relationship. The action goes backwards and forwards in time. The terse script must have been murder to learn.
The most dramatic moment is when the lawyer in an angry mood deliberately wastes the meagre number of words, she has left by just throwing them away higgledy-piggledy without any meaning whatsoever.
Following its brief London run, Lemons Lemon Lemons Lemons Lemons can be seen in Birmingham and Brighton in March. For more information follow this link.
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