Cute as a pair of buttons, 'Blink's young protagonists Jonah (Harry McEntire) and Sophie (Rosie Wyatt) look like the perfect couple. But things are not as they seem in Phil Porter's new play, which transfers to the Soho Theatre fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe.
He is a runaway member of an oddball religious commune who has arrived in London possessed of precisely zero social skills. She is a sheltered daddy's girl struggling to cope with the death of her father. When Jonah moves into the flat below Sophie's – which she also owns – she semi-encourages him to stalk her in an effort to assuage her loneliness. As you do.
Porter has written a weird, funny play that offers a compellingly mad take on the isolation of modern urban living. But Murphy's production is too sweetly understated to fully do it justice.
The ironic cuteness is effective at first, and McEntire and Wyatt are so weapons-grade winsome as to basically pull it
off anyway. But once the penny has dropped over how fucked-up Jonah and Sophie are, the prevailing air of gentle whimsy does becomes tiring, taking the edge off a script that deserves a funnier, darker treatment.