REVIEW: PASSION at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre 7 - 11 February 2023

‘A strong and brave piece of theatre’ ★★★ ½ 

A powerful one act, one hour play that interrogates homophobia, self-denial and religious immovability, Passion is a tragic play about a young man grappling with his homosexuality under the backdrop of his religious, traditional upbringing. Writer-actors Tom Dalrymple and Nadav Burstein deliver two extraordinarily brave performances of an emotionally complex script that really holds nothing back. They bear naivety and vulnerability alongside anger and fragility in raw, well-balanced performances.

Jude and Joshua, two young men who have been friends since childhood, are the central characters in a covert romantic relationship. However, Jude’s father, a devout Christian and a homophobe, catches his son watching gay pornography and sends him for a week’s conversion therapy. The audience experiences the emotional manipulation of Jude’s conversion therapy, made all the more poignant by its interspersal among flashbacks of his time in love with Joshua: we see Jude losing a part of himself and the part of him he loses at once. The script was funny and intimate as well as angry and tragic, guiding a multifaceted emotional journey that its subject matter necessitates.

The set is minimal and well-used: a mattress leans against the stage-left wall, ropes hang ominously upstage and two stools, one centre stage, the other surrounded by books and a lamp lies downstage right. The mattress is quickly moved to centre stage and acts as a transitory space being both Jude’s bed at home and his bed at conversion therapy. Once moved, however, it leaves a large space to stage-right which feels subsequently under-used and its noticeable emptiness threatens to unbalance the space.  As the focal point of much of the action – sexual, romantic, angry and tragic – the mattress as a large and central set-piece is in danger at times of overshadowing action occurring around and behind it.

The lighting forces an audience into the story with bright glares over them – requiring them to consider their own position in the narrative – but at times especially through the play’s middle section, without an identifiable cohesive structure by which the audience is lit, the design begins to distract rather than support the production.

It is a piece in part about physicality – it is about sex and beauty, and about soul and self, exploring the exploitation of the unity or disunity of physical and metaphysical. As such I was impressed and delighted to see this explored through physical theatre, the choreography and execution of which is beautiful. Movement is elegant, deliberate and retained a uniqueness for each character that often is lost in favour of image or silhouette. Alongside some well-placed humour, the interlacing of Christian poses is also a powerful reinforcement of the narrative backdrop: Christ bearing the cross and on crucifix were both alluded to, and I wonder now if I missed a pieta there somewhere…!

By the piece’s twist, however, I was left feeling almost robbed of a story in which I had grown increasingly invested. I wondered, at first, whether the plot became confused at its denouement: the climactic revelation renders the narrative that drives most of the plot neither only memory nor only imagination but imagined memory – is this too much of a suspension to ask of an audience? On further reflection, however, the greater tragedy of course lies in the realisation that through his own denial, obstinacy and uncompromising religious fervour Jude has robbed himself of this story as much as he had robbed the audience of it. There is a very tangible empathy evoked between audience and protagonist that is rare in its accessibility, as both parties experience the loss of the same narrative from wildly different perspectives. It is a nuanced catharsis that is perhaps unsatisfying by design.

A strong and brave piece of theatre that I am glad to have seen.

PASSION by Tom Dalrymple & Nadav Burstein at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre

7-11^th February

A Floating Shed production

Lion and Unicorn Theatre, Kentish Town

Box Office https://www.thelionandunicorntheatre.com/whats-on

Directed by Frances Gillard

Performed by Tom Dalrymple & Nadav Burstein

Lighting and sound by Rhys Williams

With music by Jotham Ben-Yami

Reviewer: Basil Lockwood

Basil is an English Literature graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he spent much of his spare time reviewing theatre. He has written and directed for theatre and screen, and now works freelance as a script reader for film and TV.