Writer: Cesar Azanza

Director: Matthew Paul

Cesar Azanza’s two-hander, 50-minute play (in which he also plays Dan) is part of the Camden Fringe Festival. It examines immigration, love, change and adaptation to new circumstances and is very much “work in progress.”

Sitting less than comfortably on Bridewell Theatre’s huge playing space, the play begins with Anika (Vedika Haralalka) finally walking away from Dan at an airport. Then – although the chronology is confusingly blurred – it jumps back and forth to show their relationship from their original chance meeting in a record shop.

They come to love each other a lot, but neither is right for the other just now, although they live together for a while. When he discovers by chance that she has had an abortion without telling him, “the shit hits the fan”. They discuss whether they can clean it up. Probably not. Their relationship lacks the absolute trust that a successful partnership needs.

Both actors put in nuanced, quite convincing performances, with Azanza doing despair and emotional pain particularly well. Their characters are drawn to each other because Dan comes from Chicago and Anika from Bombay, so they are both feeling their way in London and, sometimes, able to chuckle together at British habits. Unfortunately, audibility and clarity are often casualties of the naturalistic dialogue and cavernous stage.

Moreover, given the short length of the piece, the structure is clumsy. There are too many semi-blackout scene changes to connote time shifts as both actors scurry about moving props. It’s tidily enough done, but feels bitty and interrupted.

Initially, the play makes rather good use of silences as Dan and Anika simply look at each other, wait, and we begin to sense their complicated feelings. Then – presumably as a strategy to bulk out the piece’s length – come occasional forays into a sort of dance drama accompanied by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. They add little or nothing, although the characters do, at one point, discuss their liking, or not, for Vivaldi, which feels like a contrivance to justify the mime interludes.

This is a show with potential, but it still needs a lot of work, followed, maybe, by staging in a much more intimate in-the-round space.

Reviewed on 13 August 2025

Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025