FORCE OF HABIT - REVIEW - BARONS COURT THEATRE

“…a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of marriage” – John Milton

Force of Habit at Barons Court Theatre tells an old story with new flair. A man and a woman fall in love, and we watch as that love is tested over the course of a complicated (and complicating) marriage. In the centre of the stage is a table and two perennially half-full wine glasses, visually reminding us of the night they first met, as we watch their early affection wither and recede to memory.

The story is told through continuous description: the characters hardly ever speak to each other, preferring to address the audience, and they constantly interrupt one another. While their explicit narration gives numerous rationalisations for their developing distance, we are left with the impression that the inability to communicate directly, to speak and be heard by the person who matters, is a much bigger challenge for their marriage than the strain of childrearing or the complexity of shared finances.

This direct narration causes the play to lurch from one instance of romantic difficulty to another. In some senses, this continuous forward motion is the point, and the overall experience is one that mirrors the disorientation and sense of lost time that afflicts the characters. The cost of this is that relatively little time is spent developing the characters as independent people. All we ever learn about them is how they behave in their relationship, and even these behaviours sometimes seem contradictory or unmotivated. Maybe this, too, is the point – we see them in the same conflicted way as their partner.

Any issues of characterisation are deftly overcome by strong central performances from Michael Hajiantonis and Mercedes May López. They maintain a conversational tone, capitalising on the intimate theatre space to make the audience feel like they are being let into the private life of real people.

Force of Habit is a subtle and rewarding interrogation of why two people, once in love, cannot give this same intimate access to each other.

{🎟 AD – PR invite – Tickets were gifted in exchange for an honest review}

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