Barney Norris’s debut play creates a delicately tormented after-world, where two lovers are doomed to repeat and analyse their first actions again and again. Teenagers Jack and Holly first meet at New Year in Salzburg, but their subsequent encounters are less specific and more ambiguous.
A bare black stage plants the focus solely on the interaction between them, carefully choreographed by director Alice Hamilton. The tone is abstracted and almost Beckettian but there’s also sharp observation. You can related to the coyly borrowed cigarette, the awkward, jarring questions that initiate conversation and indeed relationships.
Roseanna Frascona’s Holly is a shade overstated for the necessary self-consciousness and vulnerability, but Charles Reston’s Jack is bewildered and pitch-perfect. Their episodes of repeated memories are vulnerable, resonant and heightened by the delicate chords from Mozart which connect them together.
Niceties of social interaction are countered with the overwhelmingly simple yet impossible questions of love: What is it? Where does it come from? How can you know? Like the fleeting romance it observes, ‘At First Sight’ is the epitome of short and sweet.