I’m going to make a little breach of Cherwell Stage etiquette here. Ordinarily it’s considered good manners to review the script and the production of a play as an organic whole, with good reason. Student stage criticism has a half-life of a week at most, after all, so to all intents and purposes the particular production happening right now is the play.
With new writing, however – and especially with new writing that might get resurrected on a different stage one day – it seems wiser to pare the soul away from the body once in a while, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do with Back to Back.
The Writing: You walk into your Oxford entrance examination, and turn over your paper. On the reverse side there are only six words: Love. Discuss. You have 20 minutes. Shit. Where you do even begin? Brotherly love? Agape? Platonic love? Book-burning, sheet-staining, rain-kissing romance?
Neuss’ play is the best response to this question you could possibly hope for. It opens with a mother (called Mother) sending her daughter (called Child) to find love. This she does, in the shape of young lovers LOVEr and beLOVEd, who rush into one another’s arms in a shower of amatory cliche (“two become one, it’s unnatural, like cell division going backwards”), lie down and wake up to find everything they hate about one another tattooed on their backs.
What follows is a thoughtful and thought-provoking dramatisation of love and resentment as two flipsides of the same phenomenon: “My darlings, don’t you know how harmonies are born? I can weave together dissonances, make us all sing together.” Neuss’ language is teasingly, deliberately enigmatic, more poem than play. She presents the script as a kind of puzzle-box, with the essence of love locked away in its heart under a lattice of paradoxes and riddles.
This little box is elegantly wrought, but when you finally get to the centre you may be a little disappointed: for at the centre there are only more questions. 20 minutes simply isn’t enough to arrive at any kind of answer to the question What is love?, and it is impressive that Neuss even achieves dramatic closure. In Back to Back’s breathless dash through the full course of a relationship, many things fall by the wayside and get left behind, unfinished: the central conceit of the tattoos, for instance, is not developed as far as it might be, and the characterisation is a little too sparse even for an allegory.
Nevertheless, this tantalising and carefully crafted piece would certainly have gotten its author into Oxford.
The Production: Directors Orrock and Gilbert put as little as possible in between the playwright’s vision and the audience. The staging is starkly simple – the action revolves around a double bed with two single blankets – and the ubiquitous nightwear creates a gentle wash of intimacy. There are one or two exquisite dramatic touches: the lovers reveal their naked backs to the audience before going to bed; and when they fight to read one another’s litanies of hate they wrestle as though playfighting.
The acting is good, if a little blunted by the allegorical nature of the script. Jenni MacKenzie is hauntingly fragile as Child, while Luke Gormley’s blend of tenderness and wiry aggression is compelling. The physical relationship between all three of the main characters is extremely strong. Overall, Neuss’ words have been sensitively brought to life, although the production does not quite contrive to add the flesh and blood that are missing from the script.
