Abigail

Ordinary bloke on the cusp of a midlife crisis meets beautiful younger woman with daddy issues. The tropes that writer Fiona Doyle is playing with in ‘Abigail’ are achingly familiar. And although her play’s timeline hops around – back and forth from first meeting to bitter break-up – there’s none of the same agility in her handling of its central couple. 

Doyle wrote the Papatango Prize-winning ‘Coolatully’ in 2014. ‘Abigail’ is not a follow-up but a spruced up earlier play – and you can tell. It feels a bit like an exercise, a writer flexing her muscles on a time-bending challenge. There are moments of real tension, when blackouts take you from awkward romance to moments of pure menace. But although director (and The Bunker co-founder) Joshua McTaggart takes the play at a zippy pace, it doesn’t make up for clunky dialogue and lightly sketched characters. 

Abigail (Tia Bannon) is a thin cut-out, the kind of brittle, damaged-goods stereotype that trips through ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. You could get away with a Holly Golightly if she had someone more solid to flit around, but the unnamed male role (Mark Rose) feels even more under-imagined, as washed thin as his presumably long-cherished Nirvana T-shirt. 

Add in a soap-worthy (and pretty tasteless) victim-turned-abuser plotline and we’re firmly in telly land. This feeling is challenged by Max Dorey’s design, a cascade of stacked cubes, which makes exciting use of this atmospheric space.

The Bunker’s still finding its feet as a venue, and McTaggart’s stylish production suggests some of its potential. But this underwhelming love story isn’t quite enough to make me fall for it.