There's a genuinely inventive idea at the heart of This Is Where I Leave You, Nayib Jean Baptiste's play about a pair of exes commissioned to turn their failed romance into a play. Cole (Kenndrick Horton), a panto writer with a taste for structure, and Neil (Matthew Jasper), a laid-back retired footballer, narrate and needle one another from the present, while their younger selves (Fraser Gibson and Set Myint) fall for each other, and then apart, in front of them. The device of watching two people argue over how to tell their own love story, while that story plays out beside them, is a clever one, and under Valerie Mo's direction it lands more often than not. All four performers are well cast and clearly comfortable with the piece's slipperiness between memory and reconstruction, past and present, comedy and confession.
There's real wit here too. The play finds plenty of laughs in the awkwardness of watching your past self through the eyes of an ex who remembers things rather differently, and the closing stretch earns a note of quiet, hard-won hope: the sense that a bit of distance and reflection might, just might, have let things go another way.
Where the production comes unstuck is pacing. At a tight sixty minutes, there simply isn't enough room for the central relationship to breathe. Cole and Neil's younger selves meet, fall for each other and are already unravelling within what feels like minutes, so we're never quite given the texture of what made them work in the first place, the small intimacies and easy affection that would make the eventual collapse sting. Instead, the play accelerates almost immediately into jealousy, arguments, selfishness and raised voices, and while the shouting is committed, volume isn't always the same thing as feeling; a few of the more heated exchanges tell us the characters are hurting rather than letting us feel it ourselves.
The bones of something rather special are visible throughout. With more room to let the relationship's good moments land, and more space for the characters' journey to deepen before the fighting starts, this could be a genuinely moving piece of new writing,