Strategic Love Play, Soho Theatre review ★★★★★

With her 2020 play Scenes with Girls, playwright Miriam Battye explored the nuance of female friendships in a world that teaches young women these relationships come second to those with prospective partners. Her latest, which proved a hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, examines contemporary heterosexual dating culture through a first encounter between Jenny and Adam, two wildly different 30-somethings unlikely to have met were it not for the random roulette of dating-app algorithms.

Early scenes offer shrewd insights into the cycle of hope, disappointment and fatigue those looking for love online often get embroiled in, but then the narrative takes a surreal turn and relations between the pair shape shift from being uncomfortable to intense to confusing as they scan each other’s potential to save them from the numbers game.


Letty Thomas and Archie Backhouse. Photo: Pamela Raith Photography

It opens with a set-up anyone with experience of online dating will recognise: Adam (Archie Backhouse) and Jenny (Letty Thomas) sit opposite one another in a pub, drinking as they realise they’re an awkward match. Jenny is the intelligent, confident, bitterly jaded square peg to Adam’s laddy, dismissive, play-by-the-book round hole. They’ve both brought their emotional baggage to the table, which they’re quick to air. The following exchanges between the pair result in a verbal car crash, with Jenny prying and provoking, and Adam hurling back insults in an attempt at self-preservation. It should end there, really, but both parties know the soft rule of these encounters is to stay for two pints, which Jenny somehow coaxes Adam into doing.

Then Jenny suggests something wacky and her acute powers of persuasion outweigh Adam’s ability to reason. Before we know it, the two are mentally propelling themselves into a thinly sketched future built on arbitrary compromises.

It’s the scenes in which they voice-note their friends (while the other is out of earshot, getting in a round), that we see their gentler, less guarded sides. Here are two people who genuinely want this date to go well, if only so that their coupled-up friends can stop worrying about them.


Archie Backhouse and Letty Thomas. Photo: Pamela Raith Photography

Backhouse and Thomas are well cast as Adam and Jenny, adding depth and believability to their characters even when their actions take bizarre turns and seem to defy all logic. In director Katie Posner’s production, the power struggle between the pair is etched into their every stance, with the assured Jenny often standing over the hesitant, seated Adam. When the date takes a dreamlike tangent, the two step away from designer Rhys Jarman’s wooden table, which had previously grounded the play in its pub setting. Then Adam pours Jenny a beer from the table lamp, and suspicions that we might have left reality are confirmed.

‘You’re so nice, we’re so hurt, it doesn’t work,’ Jenny spits at Adam in one of several moments that see her hold him to account for all mankind. (His biblical name is presumably no coincidence.) It’s a statement that neatly captures how impossible the dating game feels for many long-term singles.

If ‘state of the nation’ plays use their plots to offer commentary on contemporary society, this is a ‘state of the dating game’ play; an at times funny but ultimately depressing two-hander that captures in sharp focus the experience of dating in your 30s, then takes it somewhere extreme in an unsettling subversion of the boy-meets-girl archetype.