Last Time

Lucas (Mark Yeates) has been away for a spell; he says in London, but do we believe him?  Jesse (Lottie Beckett) has noticed he’s back in town and gets in touch.  By the end of the play, we understand why.  They hooked up maybe a year ago – a one night stand.  Of course, each remembers it differently…

They make very frank but awkward jokes about sex before they’re even on stage in Lucas’s shambolic apartment.  Lucas himself is, not to put too fine a point on it, a slob.  Jesse has contacted him, but he’s in rumpled grubby clothes and his hair looks like he just got out of bed.  Jesse, rather stylish, quips that she can see he dressed for the occasion.  The gibe doesn’t disturb Lucas – irony is not his forte.  He’s a writer and, to Jesse’s ill-concealed amazement, he’s got a book deal with a sizeable advance. 

Jesse is also a writer and – as we learn – a much better writer than Lucas, but she’s struggling.  The advance is for his dreadful novel, from which he insists on reading aloud – to get her opinion, he says.  It’s risible porn, just awful, a likely entry in the ‘Bad Sex’ writing prize.  What he wants is the ‘tell me how you love it’ reaction – even as the audience squirms and laughs listening to him.  But what we’re really watching here is Beckett’s gamut of reactions as she listens to this tripe…  And then Jesse pounces…  

Underneath the brittle, funny, just slightly exaggerated surface, there is a cynicism and a bleakness in Last Time characteristic of contemporary ‘relationship’ plays.  Things are not so dire (or as deep?) here as, say, Clare Barron’s Shhhh (currently at Red Stitch, but what we’re getting is the obverse of the rom com: ‘And so they lived angry and miserable ever after…’  Maybe we’ve had too many rom coms and wised up (finally) – or we think we have as a means of self-protection from hurt and disappointment.

So what pulls us through Last Time?  First, Henby’s sharply observed, very funny script, her incisive direction and her skilful use of the Black Box stage.  Things never get static, but the characters’ moves are constantly revealing – mainly of Lucas’ oblivious selfishness and Jesse’s simmering anger. 

Primarily, Yeates and Beckett are a pleasure to watch. It’s not easy to play, as Yeates does, a character so self-absorbed, so ridiculous, so unaware of his wince-making inadequacies.  Beckett, meanwhile, gives us a slow burn performance, building from jokey irony to incredulity to matter-of-fact cut-through contempt.  She’s a huge talent with gloriously precise comic timing.

Michael Brindley