Being in your twenties can be thrilling, and it can be incredibly daunting too. Relationships and situations change, and while this can bring a wealth of opportunities, the distancing that occurs between friends can be incredibly isolating. It is this sense of unsettlement that writer Alexandra Shaw deftly captures in this neat new work.
Where Would You Like To Start? centres upon Frances (Eleanor Cross) and Jonah (Alasdair Linn, standing in here and who also directs), a sweet and well-suited couple, but one that is perhaps a little overwrought and almost certainly over-therapised. Frances’s dreams of becoming an author have left her in a publishing job she struggles to enjoy, while Jonah’s eco-friendly architectural work excites him but seemingly no one else. As a pair, the duo functions neatly as a microcosm for ambitious individuals in their twenties, settling down perhaps too quickly and with a persistent anxiety that things could go wrong, or that what they have is not what they really want.
Matters are complicated by Frances’s fading relationship with best friend Sadie (Mia Haynes-French), with the pair drifting apart as life gets in the way, while Sadie’s charmingly sweet but slightly goofy gardener boyfriend Rich (Wesley Ruthven) is perhaps a little too on the nose in Shaw’s attempts to capture the simplicity of life for some. Nevertheless, the pair function almost as a foil to Frances and Jonah, a point of comparison that exposes the latter’s quirks, insecurities, and jealousies.
In truth, not a great deal happens over the play’s 70 minutes, but that does not negate the impact of Shaw’s writing or Linn’s direction. What the play does remarkably well is capture a commonly felt insecurity with which audiences will no doubt resonate, with the personal and professional crossroads facing Frances in particular feeling immediately authentic within Shaw’s script. This is undoubtedly aided by the terrific individual performance from Cross, whose deft facial expressions and subtle winces are a sublime example of careful characterisation, pointing towards Cross being seen on a bigger stage soon.
Much of the play is moulded around the therapy sessions that Frances and Jonah both have separately, directed neatly by Linn in having the therapist facing away from the audience. This draws attention to the nervous flickers of both leads while heightening the sense of intimacy in the moment, helped by the tight confines of the venue’s performance space.
Linn’s portrayal of Jonah is effective as the charming, eager-to-please boyfriend, refraining from becoming too intense. Shaw’s writing rightly deviates from a worryingly telegraphed potential workplace affair, recognising that the characters’ own anxieties evoke enough tension here. Haynes-French, meanwhile, is subtly effective in crafting the deflected insecurities of Sadie, while Ruthven’s working-class Rich is a little caricaturish, though this resolves itself as the play reaches its end.
While the work is held back slightly by its insistence on scene changes and unnecessary costume changes, where it should trust its audience to understand the time jumps instead, Where Would You Like To Start? is an intelligent deep dive into the pressures on ambitious young people, from all walks of life, trying to find themselves today.
Led by a terrific Cross, it is an impressively moving piece, and one that will impact many watching who have felt the same, or who feel the same, as Frances does here.
