The feelgood hit of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, this fanciful “play with songs” from David Greig and Gordon McIntyre has come south as a bittersweet midwinter treat. Granted, this two-person rom-com starts deconstructing itself with almost indecent haste. Almost the moment we meet the lawyer Helena and Bob, a semi-crooked car salesman, they start disputing how it all happened, acting out their wonky love story and singing McIntyre’s tender songs, guitars in hand. But if Greig is a writer who can’t always leave his ingenuity be, this frolic has enough emotional underbelly to give him a permit for playfulness.
On a bedroom set that stands in for locations all over Edinburgh, Helena and Bob hook up in a cellar bar. Sex ensues — amusingly. His thoughts wander. She forces her moans. This is not happy-ever-after.
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But consummation is just the starting point. Both characters are 35, both are (in the words of McIntyre’s most affecting song) “itching to be told that life does more than make you old”.
Helena may just be pregnant by her married lover. Bob is tired of romantic adventuring. And when he bumps into Helena again the next day — she’s late and hungover outside her sister’s wedding, he’s seeking sanctuary with a Tesco bag full of his boss’s money — they’re surprised to find they rather like each other. The fantasy that follows, as they embark on a crazy spending jag, is made real by the quality of its observations: the parking meter that reminds them that “change is possible”, the Oddbins boss who closes his shop to taste some £100 wines with them.
You want to do something that stupid yourself. “So this,” says Helena, “is the legendary lost weekend.”
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The events unfold over a midsummer weekend, and you need to buy into a sub-Shakespearean sense of enchantment to accommodate ridiculously easy resolutions of problems to get to a Monday morning that offers hope but no more magic.
Though the first half of this 90-minute show impressed me rather than seduced me, eventually I fell under its spell. Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon work wonders: witty but not glib, sexy and never plasticky, convincing when Greig’s live production asks them to tone it down.
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So Midsummer has its cake and eats it — mocking rom-com conventions while reviving them for characters jerking from youth into middle age. Sometimes it could work less hard for more rewards, but the central impulse — is this all adulthood is? — sustains the tomfoolery and makes both the rom and the com stick.
Box office: 020-7478 0100, to Feb 6