Simon Ward reviews Tell Me You’ll Think About It at the Hen and Chickens Theatre

In Lyndsey Ruiz’s debut play Tell Me You’ll Think About It , in which she also stars, a young couple have returned to their flat after an evening at the theatre. Ruiz plays Phoebe, a theatre reviewer, who is bursting to share her thoughts about the show they have just watched with boyfriend David, played by Boyan Petrov. Well, sharing her thoughts might be overstating it – she subjects him to a diatribe of abuse and outrage at the play, which sounds like the first draft of her review. Although she does ask for his opinion, she clearly doesn’t value it, especially when he has the temerity to disagree with her. And we begin to see that this seems to be the pattern of their relationship – she, a headstrong firebrand charging ahead, while he trails sheepishly in her wake, trying to keep up and occasionally get a word in edgeways. But this evening, perhaps, may be the moment when the worm turns.

Their disagreements over the play spin off into an examination of their own relationship: the play they’ve watched was supposedly based on Lysistrata – the comedy by Aristophanes where the women of Athens successfully stop the Peloponnesian war by witholding sex from their menfolk. In Phoebe’s telling of it, however, the writer has added a coda undermining the original message by concluding that what women really want, after all, is to find true love. Which, to her, is an absurd, belittling and suffocating thought. Her ambitions are so much greater. How could David possibly have enjoyed that?

We soon learn that, as well as her reviewing, Phoebe is writing a play of her own, or at least trying to. We find out, too, that progress is slow. She is just as capable of exposing the limitations of her own writing as she is of other people’s. But she has to keep trying. David’s highest ambition is to be in love and raise a family. With Phoebe, if she will agree. But how can they have children when she has so much still to do? And so they argue, at length and with passion, tearing each other apart, realise that they need to split up, then that they have to stay together. Maybe they can go travelling, get out of the rut.

Under the direction of Sarah Majland the two prowl around each other like caged animals, occasionally coming together then more spectacularly splitting apart, in a dance they have been playing out for years. If it is sometimes hard to believe that they have existed as a couple for so long with this level of volatility and apparent lack of compatibility, maybe that is the point. Concluding with a cheekily clever epilogue, this is a play that will have couples debating its themes as they leave the theatre. Uh-oh…

Tell Me You’ll Think About It is running at the Hen and Chickens Theatre, 109 St Paul’s Road, London N1 2NA until Saturday 15th March.