Vibe Check

We first meet Beth (Freya Patience) and Harry (Oscar Morphew) in Harry’s bed.  They’ve hooked up the night before (as is the way of things nowadays) and now face the awkwardness of ‘Who is this person?’  And ‘What am I doing here?’  Plus, the need to get to the bathroom in what we guess is a small apartment and the anxiety about the necessary sounds...  But Harry smooths things over with some micro-waved chicken korma and naan, and Beth rabbits on – as she tends to do – about her gluten intolerance…  She works with children and he’s a bricklayer.  And so it begins.    

The title Vibe Check gives you the tone: they’re just checking the vibe here.  An attempt to be objective.  Careful.  Is the vibe good?  Bad?  Are we cool?  Is she going to be difficult, clingy, demanding?  Is he going to be possessive, dominating, mansplaining? 

Beth and Harry lay out the ground rules.  They like each other but neither really wants a relationship.  Been there, done that – and it was messy, painful and they still have the scars.  You know.  Harry reserves the right to see other people.  Beth agrees.  Of course, she does.  Nevertheless, they continue to see each other, and the careful tiptoeing around each other melts away.  The self-protective evasions drop away.  Almost.  We don’t know if the sex is good, bad, or just standard good enough; the play doesn’t go there. 

But Beth and Harry go on dates.  They have fun.  They tease each other.  They see each other regularly – but not too regularly because that would mean they were in a relationship.  Of course, they are in a relationship, but they still say they’re not.  Things really reach a peak when they treat themselves to night in a luxury hotel and sleep deeply in each other’s arms.  Harry says it’s his best sleep ever…

The limitations of the Butterfly Club stage inevitably hinder the narrative somewhat.  There’s a bed on one side and a pot plant on the other.  We do have to catch up quickly as to whether we’re at Harry’s place or at Beth’s – it’s always the same bed.  Transitions between the brief scenes are marked with blackouts, the actors leaving the stage… and coming back on again.  Nor are we always quite sure about just how much time has passed.  Although the strengths of text and performance carry things along and hold our interest, I wondered if this would work as television, or a series of webisodes.

Vibe Check is a fear of commitment story – a familiar story in its way.  But here it’s taken to another level by Greta Doell’s sharp eye and very good ear for her generation’s foibles and flaws – and enhanced by Stephanie Lee’s direction.  Frey Patience and Oscar Morphew seem at first an unlikely couple, but their performances overcome that.  He’s bluff, blokey and jokey.  She’s sweet, sometimes vague, and openly affectionate.

But we know the rules of the genre.  From about the midpoint of this bittersweet, tense but funny sixty-minute mini-rom com, we know that either this is going to work out – or it’s not.  What starts out as ‘friends with benefits’ will have to be acknowledged, finally, as love, actually, and commitment.  Or not.

The curious thing here is that we, the audience, are not really longing and hoping for Beth and Harry to declare their love and commit to each other.  We don’t invest that much in its working out – and the reason is that, really, Beth and Harry don’t seem to invest that much either.  That’s their generation.  Hook up, have sex, sort of get to know each other, maybe, have some good times, maybe, and then…  Romance?  Are you kidding?  The predominantly young people in our audience seemed to recognise and be held by Beth and Harry.  There was laughter at the clever, funny dialogue, but some of the laughter was rueful too.  A good date show?  Maybe.

Michael Brindley