Review: COUNTER, VAULT Festival

A man is sitting by himself in a pub. A woman runs in, late. He is aggravated that she didn't text him her ETA. They share the awkward familiarity of ex-lovers. It appears she hasn't been in contact with him for three weeks after a decade-long serious relationship. What happens next in Maggie N. Razavi's piece is a masturbatory look at an infuriating lack of communication.

Max Norman and Rivkah Bunker jump between their inner voice and the social conventions of a failed partnership. Lights change and the characters address the audience, lashing out and acknowledging their true feelings for the other person, then go back to the counter and give them a heavily redacted and revised version of it. Finally, she asks their public what they should do - as if it wasn't a given that she needs to leave him.

She fell in love with his stability; he was intrigued by her trauma. He wants to maintain the middle-class dream, but she despises it (even though that's the reason she got together with him?). Essentially, they contradict themselves constantly and come off as not great people. "We just need to communicate" she says, but then neither of them does.

It might try to establish a naturalistic approach to our emotions - how many times, after all, we don't practice what we preach? - but it becomes eye-rolling in its bland predictability. An attempt at poetic prose is made in the monologues, but the language is generally a standardised aggrandisation of colloquial metaphors. The moral of the story is, do not stay with someone boring simply because they can give you a nice house in the suburbs.

Counter runs at VAULT Festival until 12 February.

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