Stage: Grappling with intimacy

Undetectable
by Tom Wright
dir Rikki Beadle-Blair
with Lewis Brown, Freddie Hogan
King's Head Theatre, Islington • 12.Feb-7.Mar.20

Taking a complex look at the difference between intimacy and sex, this provocative two-hander draws the audience into a constantly shifting dialog about the nature of connection. The fact that it's a gay couple adds several additional textures, but the topic has a remarkable universality that anyone can identify with. It also helps that the spiralling conversation includes moments that are warm, funny, sexy, wrenching and emotionally engaging.

Bradley and Lex (Brown and Hogan) have been going out for three months, and both are feeling that it's time to have sex for the first time. But each has issues from his past that are causing him to pause. These relate to feelings surrounding safer-sex and HIV, drugs and alcohol, past relationships and self-doubt, all of which come out as they talk to each other, taking turns on the offensive and defensive while also finding common ground. This includes an extended flashback for each man: Bradley revisiting his wildly drug-fuelled party days and Lex remembering a tragedy from his romantic past.

Sustaining a conversation over 90 minutes without a break is no mean feat, and director Beadle-Blair adeptly switches things up constantly, keeping these guys in motion. The stage is a raised bed in the middle of the theatre, surrounded by the audience. These two guys climb on it, run around it, hide behind it as they get into and out of their clothing and the bedding, revealing and obscuring themselves from each other. Clever lighting and music add to the atmosphere, never telling the audience what to think or feel but highlighting the issues these men are grappling with. And Wright's script never moralises at all, which is refreshing considering the potent themes.

Both Brown and Hogan deliver remarkably wrenching performances that evoke a wide range of emotions, from playful tenderness to full-throttle screaming, without ever becoming overwrought. Because the audience is so close to the actors, this kind of underplaying is essential to maintain authenticity, and both men create remarkably private moments surrounded by a crowd of observers. Their performances are also full-bodied, both physically and emotionally, often leaving them (and the audience) sweaty and out of breath. This makes the connection between them powerfully real, with genuine ripples of doubt about where the relationship is headed, offering some proper suspense in the narrative. So we both empathise and root for them, layering our own feelings and opinions into the story to bring it to life in unexpected ways. Which of course leaves us with a lot to think about after the lights come up.

15.Feb.20

Critical Week: Woody goes west

London-based critics had our first screening of Woody Allen's new comedy-drama Blue Jasmine, which sees him return to America after working in Europe for most of the past decade. But he's not back in New York: it's San Francisco this time, and it's one of his best scripts in years. It also features a knock-out performance from Cate Blanchett. We also caught up with Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch in David Gordon Green's tender, endearingly offbeat comedy-drama Prince Avalanche, plus Keri Russell in the rather silly comedy Austenland, which is likely to appeal mainly to 40ish single women.

In the arthouse department, we had Cold Comes the Night, a tense, quiet and ultimately lightweight thriller with Alice Eve and Bryan Cranston. Kristin Scott Thomas once again steals the show in the French comedy-drama Looking for Hortense, but her role is secondary to Jean-Pierre Bacri in a less interesting role as a man in a muddle. Rikki Beadle-Blair's new British drama Bashment is a searing, fiercely important look at racism and homophobia in the music scene. Kuma is a fascinating, eerily urgent drama about a Turkish family in Vienna, caught in a tangled web of culture and class. And Lucy Walker's The Crash Reel is an astonishing documentary about traumatic brain injury, made much more personal as it's also the story of snowboarder Kevin Pearce.

This coming week we finally get to see Kick-Ass 2, just before it opens. And we have screenings of the next franchise-starter The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan in Le Week-end, the Patrick Wilson/Rose Byrne reunion Insidious 2, Clio Barnard's acclaimed The Selfish Giant, the award-winning Chilean comedy-drama Gloria, and the Swedish prostitution epic Call Girl. I'll also get to revisit Gregg Araki's Nowhere and Rene Clement's Plein Soleil.