Brighton Fringe 2026
Chemistry
Producer Rachel Verhoef
Genre: American Theater, Contemporary, Dark Comedy, Drama, Fringe Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre, Tragedy
Venue: Grania Dean Studio, The Lantern Theatre, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
For her it’s lust at first sight; for him maybe love and maybe that’s what they both need, though Steph forbids it. Can’t they help each other? “If I let myself love I’ll destroy you” Steph warns Jamie. Jacob Marx-Rice’s Chemistry is directed at the Grania Dean Studio, Lantern Theatre, Brighton by Amalia Kontesi till May 18.
A breakthrough work about love on the roll of a pill. Outstanding.
Review
Med-cute? Jamie, an uber-bright young politico working for government meets super-smart Brown University drop-out Steph. They start talking chemistry. The meds they take. As they’re meeting in a psychiatrist’s waiting-room. He’s unipolar: “rare as a unicorn” Steph says. She’s chronically depressive. But there’s chemistry. The other kind. For her it’s lust at first sight; for him maybe love and maybe that’s what they both need, though Steph forbids it. Can’t they help each other? “If I let myself love I’ll destroy you” Steph warns Jamie. Jacob Marx-Rice’s Chemistry is directed at the Grania Dean Studio, Lantern Theatre, Brighton by Amalia Kontesi till May 18.
Steph (Kathryn Bates) and Jamie (Rowland Stirling) show not only total immersion and fluidity in a show they’ve been appearing in for several months. It’s the trust and hyper-naturalism they inhabit in their roles: their physicality and jokiness, the sudden tensings, that make them visitors from another plane of excellence.
Steph soon quips why she was in fact kicked out of uni: the story of her life. “So he found me hanging and had to tell them. If it had been a girl she’d have understood.” Brown’s is famously Ivy-League and rich, allergic to scandal; Jamie’s explicitly from Columbia University, New York. There’s a subtle social dimension too. Steph’s expectations of life are near zero. It’s just the risks involved in failed suicide: brain damage, paralysis, that stops her. Yet she’s lusty after she gets the right meds that don’t knock out her libido; and when she meets Jamie he’s slower on the uptake than he should be. But love? That’s out of bounds. When their brains are the enemy of happiness and meds are an excuse for social control, or acceptance. At the expense of living fully: or is that in order to live at all?
Yet Jamie persists. In this quip-smart med-fest of lithium and the periodic table of depression, terms and American ellipses for smarts scatter across the dialogue, well like lithium tablets and the other smarties both of them take. Then don’t. Yet Jamie can’t function on the downers he’s given: he can’t use his manic-fast mind, and feels he needs to wean himself off to do what he does and loves best (apart from Steph). Steph argues against. But then follows. Trouble is, she points out, some diseases work for you. For a while at least. Being unipolar and working flat-out suits Jamie. He’s in his element. For now. But why Steph needs to come off as a mirror to Jamie’s decision is faintly baffling. She begins to stay in. You begin to fear for Jamie, then Steph.
Before this there’s a smorgasbord of love crises like a rom-com in a pitch-dark ward seen by two inmates. Steph works in a bar. She accidentally smashes a glass. So the other 200 have to go. And there’s a real glass-smash (hopefully sugar-glass!). Then Jamie’s to the rescue with a new 200 intake, because OCD as he is, he’s already noted the exact brand and can replace before bar owner Patrick returns. Stirling sweeps up, which is reassuring. There’s other gags too, with dancing and love-making, suitably truncated.
Throughout the lighting varies, often red for danger, pink for the glow of love and equilibrium; pastel green for happier lithium-like moments. And blank white for clear day. Otherwise there’s just a few squares to assemble a bed and a blanket. Steph’s two Nirvana t-shirts make a contrasting statement in white then black; and two clothes-racks have both actors stripping off and redressing. A trope of passing time has Stirling continually circle the diminutive Grania Dean: tying and untying his tie for work, or home late from it. And these spirals of his work round seem to create in Steph a metaphor for someone circling her own grave as she sinks further.
70 minutes spin past in a whirligig of feeling, fielding a linguistic velocity both thrilling and often med-savvy. Chemistry is sexy too, and Steph’s often cheerfully explicit. Did I say it’s often funny, and numbingly sad. It’s Fringe because of its length and compactness, though in reality it’s a fully-fledged play that never outstays its material, despite delivering a world of pharmaceutical precisions and terms we know glancingly. Above all it humanises two loveable people, rounded and realised, who seem made for rom-com: but are just a bit chemically challenged. As we understand it. It’s a breakthrough work about love on the roll of a pill. Outstanding.
Producer Rachel Verhoef.
