Tender at Bush Theatre

Better to tell a lie about getting sick to ensure a swift exit, only the instant guilt from the lie proves paralysing in spite of its untruth. Better to go clubbing alone, but first to make the hour-long train journey to ask the barista who’s been on the mind about coming along, even if it means buying her overpriced wares. Better not to concede to loneliness when on the face of it, nothing is really lacking.

Over its brisk 90 minutes, Eleanor Tindall’s new play discloses many of these thought trains in drolly anxious asides to the audience, wryly delivered by the two cast members who – along with a single neon yellow cushion and a mysteriously vibrating curtain – take up the entirety of our attention for the show’s duration. While merely comic beats on the face of it, the jagged disclosures that surface within their rambling stream-of-consciousness make Ivy (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi) and Ash (Annabel Baldwin) feel familiar to us within minutes. Ash is confidently funny and self-reliant, Ivy less so, but both are lonelier than they may be liable to admit. One is basking in the aftermath of a bad relationship, the other still in the thick of one, and both are written as if their creator has known them for some time and is simply transcribing instead of creating them. It’s a shame, then, that the contrived plot mechanics surrounding the two leads rarely feel as authentic as they do.

From the start, a sense of genre-bending unease hovers over proceedings, as exemplified by that vibrating wallpaper in Ash’s new flat. On the face of it, we seem to be watching an observational dramedy of manners, but Ash and Ivy’s tentative first steps towards one another are perched menacingly on the cusp of psychological horror. Ivy has a mysterious sickness that appears to flare at times of particular vulnerability, while Ash keenly feels the spectre of an abusive ex hovering close by. Without disclosing too much regarding the turns of Tindall’s plot, the result bares out the truism that it is always better for a play to settle on a single target than to take scattershot aim at multiple ones. Director Emily Aboud’s production is most evocative when zeroed in on the nervous electricity the two leads generate in their earliest encounters, promptly pulling away only to lean in again over the course of a nervy, exhilarated first date.

Ultimately, the pile-up of contrivances that leads Tender into dramatically wobbly terrain can only do so much to defuse the play’s propulsive momentum. Even at its least dramatically convincing, Tender never turns away from its two strongest elements: the interplay of the wholly natural leads (with Baldwin earning particular credit for seamlessly taking on the two supporting roles as well), and composer/sound designer Ellie Isherwood’s thrumming heartbeat of a synth score. Though it may be ambitious and adventurous, Tender is most often simply likeable. We feel we’d follow Ivy and Ash anywhere, in all their unassuming mess. Indeed, we feel they’d hold court in a story much more straightforward than the one that’s been concocted for them.

Ultimately, while its story buckles under the more melodramatic turns of its homestretch, Tender is never less than compulsively watchable, placing much of its trust in the two leads and finding that trust to be wisely placed.

Thomas Messner
Photo: Harry Elletson

Tender is at Bush Theatre from 19^th November until 21^st December 2024. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.