The Split

A heterosexual, millennial couple are adrift on a boat playing out their last days together before their inevitable split.  

An easy, even touching familiarity, some aimless chat, binds them together, but irritabilities flare and we see they rarely touch each other.  Tom glumly strums guitar, Jules draws and gazes at the horizon; there’s sunbaking, card-games and silly aping of musical favourites.

Max Garcia-Underwood and Amy Victoria Brooks play well the subtle, sometimes tender unravelling of this relationship, but it’s all unspoken.  Indeed, Sarah Hamilton gives the actors a negligible back story; we have no idea why they’re splitting, or why they even came together.  Tom at least has more to tell with his boyish uncertainties while Jules is left enigmatic.  

Director Charley Sanders works to fill the gaps but isn’t helped by a banal dialogue of non-sequiturs – it’s just not enough to hold us for 90 minutes and nor, obviously, this relationship.  

Kobe Donaldson’s lighting slowly fades through nights and days and brings welcome shifts, and his dappled backdrop and floor of moving water is perfect.  On the open bare stage Charley’s actors move inventively in their confined boat space and, notably, when they swim overboard.

You watch, and wait, and wonder if this millennial streaming of spliced banter is a poor descendent of that old absurdist chat from Samuel Beckett. Certainly Tom gets a good laugh when he announces he’s giving up Facebook.

Martin Portus