Strategic Love Play is a smart deconstruction of modern dating – review
Miriam Battye’s new two-hander, Strategic Love Play, earned rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe last month and has now opened at the Soho Theatre in London.
Having been to check it out last week, it’s easy to see why: a smart deconstruction of modern dating, we encounter Man (Archie Backhouse) and Woman (Letty Thomas) in a pub – effectively we, the audience, are flies on the wall at their first date.
What ensues is 70 minutes comprising two excellent performers exchanging some wonderfully witty and unexpected dialogue. It starts conventionally enough – our pair arrive in the pub, pints in hand, and engage in some awkward jokey small talk about how conventional this all is, congratulating themselves for managing to move things off the apps and making it as far as a date in the real world.
Pretty quickly things take a turn, as Woman suggests they skip this step entirely – the whole dating rigmarole – and just aim straight for a relationship there and then.
