Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.At the start of this beautiful, funny two-hander by the Congolese British writer Benedict Lombe, Dre is at his grandmother’s funeral, talking us through the best tactics for filling your plate at the buffet. Timing is of the essence, he warns: “I look up, just in time to see the disappointed, frozen smile on the face of a guest who just figured this out, and I think: Too slow.”He could just as well be talking about his love life: Des, the woman he has loved since he was 16, still haunts him at twice that age. After years of dancing round each other, they did get together, only to part painfully again in their mid-twenties. So when Des walks into the reception, time stands still. And when the pair go back to his Nana’s house, shifting boxes and working through a bottle of whiskey, the past comes rolling in. Lombe’s play is a romcom, one of several new shows on the London stage that play with that genre, including Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) and Peanut Butter & Blueberries. It shares qualities too with Nick Payne’s time-twisting drama Constellations, using the flexibility of live theatre to collapse the distance between past and present. But Lombe has a warm, seductive style of her own, slipping from sharp comedy to meditative soulfulness in an instant. In Lynette Linton’s deftly modulated production, the show plays like a piece of jazz, looping back and forth between past and present, returning to one highly charged encounter in particular. It’s hard to imagine it better performed than by Heather Agyepong (Des) and Tosin Cole (Dre), who build up a wonderfully intimate rapport with the audience, even in this bigger space (the production premiered at the small-scale Bush Theatre, where Linton is artistic director). They shift seamlessly from being gawky 16-year-olds — as Dre says, “two little Black kids destined to oppose each other”, she all prickly intelligence, he all blustering charm — to their wiser, weightier 32-year-old selves and everything in between. Cole drops wisecracks with pinpoint accuracy, and does the same with a piece of bombshell news. Agyepong is less impulsive, but gradually unfolds the personal history which has made her that way. Both use body language expertly, not least when they are trying to best each other in a Nigerian-Congolese dance-off. And as the play pieces together their shared history, we begin to see the pressures, complex heritage and family traumas that have shaped them.Alex Berry’s simple open set keeps us in a sort of timeless limbo, props concealed in black boxes alongside the memories they evoke. Neil Austin’s overhanging array of fluorescent light tubes switch colour to flip us between scenes from the past and the present, and to shape the mood. It’s another gorgeous winner from Linton and her theatre. ★★★★☆To October 12, shifterstheplay.co.uk
