Private View review – slick but stifling study of queer entanglement

Soho theatre, London Sex Education’s Patricia Allison and The Gold’s Stefanie Martini star in Jess Edwards’s debut play about love and science The red flags are raised and waving. This queer drama from debut playwright Jess Edwards (director of Hotter and Fitter) spirals a chance encounter into an abusive relationship. Shortlisted for numerous playwriting awards, Private View reaches for a physical manifestation of entanglement theory, where two separate particles become inextricably linked. But there is little romance here. Our unnamed women wind around each other until one of them can no longer breathe, as codependence quickly gives way to coercion. Our entangled pair are Sex Education’s Patricia Allison and The Gold’s Stefanie Martini. From their first meeting of jolting dialogue, Martini’s character – a rich, 39-year-old artist and recovering alcoholic – is intense. Off-puttingly so. Her overly sincere flirtation seems to push Allison’s character – a 23-year-old physics PhD student – away rather than pulling her close. This pattern recurs, with the surprise not in the artist’s descent into needy manipulator, but in the student’s more grounded desire to be with her.