Trading Faces

Over the last couple of years, Kentish Town's Lion and Unicorn Theatre has developed a vibrant, varied fringe rep, and 'Trading Faces', a new play from Richard Bevan, is a great choice for this little pub-theatre space. Bevan's play explores eight characters who are mixed up: in three toxic affairs, two stifling partnerships and one sado-masochistic marriage. Short scenes, dodgy sex and lots of blackouts often add up to a night of fringe cringe, but this is witty, poignant and salacious.

True, Bevan's play skimps on development - often, 'Trading Faces' feels like an introductory episode to a hip new series about fuck-buddies - but it's sharp and touching too. And Sam Rumbelow directs with tact and sensitivity: it would be easy to overplay the raucous elements in a black comedy that opens with covert bonking on City office shagpile and closes with a spot of shoe-licking, but the Actors Ensemble take their characters seriously, and avoid the temptation of playing up to the appreciative audience.

The quality of acting ranges from stiff to first rate: John Nayagam is remarkably subtle as a boozy, strip-bar-going bloke who can't even turn up on time for a sex-only relationship. The most promising strand of Bevan's play concerns a girl's affair with her female, married, Christian teacher: Georgia Winters gives a lovely, naively streetwise performance as young Lucy (arguing 'I may be young but my heart is ancient' as she makes her doomed but feisty pitch for love). Elsewhere, the bittiness of the scenarios mean that sympathy and interest are not so sustained: all these twisted affairs finally unravel, but only one's worth mourning.