Naima Khan reviews the simultaneously dark and twee Blink by Phil Porter, which cops out of really exploring the questions it provokes.
This two-hander by Phil Porter is built on an excellent premise, but not one we haven't heard of before. Two single people living in close proximity become increasingly connected although they never meet. Until of course they do. Phil's take on this familiar paradox is what gives the play its foreboding shadows.
When Sophie sends the quiet tenant of the flat below a camera that gives him the option to view her in her flat above, she invites a particularly clueless but sweet chap into her life in the form of Jonah. But these characters are constructed before the audience in such a paint-by-numbers way that they, along with their comfortable baggage of back stories, come across as irritatingly sweet and the show ends up provoking a lot more questions than it attempts to explore.
The back stories of the two central characters are the first thing that strikes me as an easy way out of those questions that Blink jabs at. Unlike Sophie, the only child of a single parent family who's just lost her dad and her job, Jonah was raised in a religious commune and leaves willingly with a bag full of his inheritance to make a life for himself in Leytonstone. While Sophie (dressed all in beige) has a need to be seen (which is how her father made her feel when he was alive), Jonah has a need to be part of something, anything: a child's cello practice or a stranger's trips to the pound shop.
On the one hand, this is no biggie. It could actually be quite clever. But as I watch Jonah and Sophie go back and forth over the minute details of their lives, I kind of want to scream at them. Did she just say she had suicidal thoughts? Are you really going to gloss over that? She sent him a camera “in a haze”!? What about the crowds of people you're speaking to who don't have remarkably good parents that are tragically dead and yet still have a need to feel validated by a stranger?
At these moments, Blink rests on those bags of back story and explains too much away. Rather than just presenting society's ills, or the undesirable symptoms of something bad to come, Phil tells us exactly why we might have ended up here, only his explanations are incredibly specific to his characters. It makes sense if you look at the anatomy of a play and decide that you need to know Sophie and Jonah's motives. But if you want this play to say something bigger - which it is just on the cusp of doing - it becomes problematic because we have an oddball struggling for normality alongside someone more normal (for want of a better word) who's life has suffered some tragic set backs.
It makes me think of Herding Cats by Lucinda Coxon which looked at the increasingly dark choices we make in life because those darker options provide some instant satisfaction, or they're a means to an ends or they're the way we're all heading anyway. Blink on the other hand, provides little reasoning and too much explanation.
That said, it is funny and insightful. Sophie and Jonah have a warm, light-hearted take on the people around them. From pretentious consultants, to German artists and people whose primary function is sacking employees, Phil's script finds humour even in sadness. Harry McEntire and Rosie Wyatt are excellent performers who stealthily bring in a quick change of tone under Joe Murphy's direction. They make a cute couple too. 
Blink runs at Soho Theatre until 22nd September
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