Brighton Year-Round 2019
Would Like To Meet
A play by Christine Kempell and Hilary Handel
Genre: Comedy, Drama, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Rialto Theatre
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Would Like To Meet takes you on a journey through the trials and tribulations of dating in the digital world with a collection of true-life dating disasters, some heartwarming tales and plenty of shocking statistics. In this age of instant gratification can true love still survive? Swipe right and see.
Review
Would like to meet takes the form of a series of sketches on different aspects of modern dating life, but as the same characters begin to recur we gradually see a more involved story developing. The play’s main focus is the friendship between married and bored Liz and single and selfish Ally as Liz realises it’s time to leave her husband and Ally becomes increasingly desperate for a man and a child to fend off the loneliness of her party lifestyle.
Additional characters are introduced in further sketches that break up the main drama and some of these characters go on to have stories of their own. This format works very nicely. It means, we the audience sometimes have an insight into the characters that lets us anticipate what they’re getting into.
The writing overall works very well. The sketch format keeps the light and humour while the relationship of the two main characters allows for depth and some powerful emotional moments. There are also a lot of good honest laughs and some great one-liners.
Sian Hutchinson captures Ally’s tightly wound desperation and it’s comic consequences without losing our sympathy and Sophie Dearlove manages to hold the serious emotional centre of the play while still delivering some killer punch lines. Each of the actors is playing several roles and occasionally I found the characterisation a bit loose and it took me a couple of seconds to be clear who was being whom but overall this is a play that is greater than the sum of its sketches.
The house for this full night was almost full, with several large groups of friends, a couple of date nights and several people who had seen the play before in a previous run and brought their friends along.
This is a feel-good show with lots of laughs that was clearly appreciated by the audience. Well worth a watch.
