'How to Fight Loneliness' review — Neil LaBute tackles the pressing issue of assisted dying in his provocative play

Read our review of How to Fight Loneliness, starring Justina Kehinde, Morgan Watkins and Archie Backhouse, now in performances at the Park Theatre to 24 May.

Pressing, of-the-moment issues look for a while as if they will distinguish How to Fight Loneliness, the first London sighting in some while from that ongoing American controversialist, Neil LaBute (Fat Pig, The Shape of Things).

Premiered pre-pandemic in Utah, the three-hander addresses assisted dying whilst adding homicide, familial tension, and any number of plot contrivances into the mix. Lisa Spirling’s direction attempts to push its way through a windy narrative that seems to keep circling back on itself, but the play’s anger and indignation fight a losing battle with improbability and melodrama. The result is watchable for a while, and then wearisome.

The opening is an extended tease, with a couple nervously awaiting the arrival of a third party for grievous reasons that are soon made clear. It’s giving nothing away, since said revelation propels the action, that wife Jodie (Justina Kehinde) is in the latter stages of brain cancer and has got tired of staving off a degree of pain that only gets added to by the day.

Lacking “the luxury of tomorrow”, she wants to bid farewell to today, but can't quite bring herself to “cross the line”: numerous suicide notes have been written and ripped up.

An, um, unusual solution presents itself in the form of a onetime classmate of hers, Tate (Morgan Watkins), whose own propensity for violence looks to be useful. What if he is hired to kill Jodie, thereby putting herself out of her misery, even if that action – murder by any other name – clearly portends misery of another kind.

Tate, we’re told, is “picky” – he only drinks domestic beer and isn’t fond of fleshy food, a preference of gathering irony given his apparent disregard for human flesh. And much of the first hour consists of the tetchy give and take between the three personages – Jodie and her antsy husband, Brad (a firm-voiced Archie Backhouse), and the lippy, feral Tate, whom Watkins plays as if the character were on loan from Tarantino.

Life as agony underpins such American titles as Night, Mother, revived a season or two ago at the Hampstead, and there’s something of that play’s defiance in the depiction of Jodie. She at least reserves the right to decide the specifics of her death for herself, even if her ill health self-evidently exists beyond her control.

Kehinde gives a hugely empathic performance as a woman aware that her days are numbered, though you have to wonder at a script that insists on Jodie “obviously dying” even when the character we see before us navigates her way nimbly around Mona Camille’s set, itself suggesting the vast reaches of the American southwest. You don’t have to have sat alongside a cancer patient, as I have, to wonder just how Jodie is so physically able to comport herself as she does.

Jodie informs us there will be “no Hollywood ending”, but I can’t help but think that a sympathetic script doctor might have requested a rewrite. As it is, we eventually arrive at the loneliness promised by the title – the two men adrift in an ethical or moral abyss, to which they offer very different responses. Somewhere along the way, Tate informs us in no uncertain terms that “this is going to be short and fast and over with”.

But all the topicality and urgency on offer can’t pre-empt one’s response to his above assertion: not quite.

How to Fight Loneliness is at the Park Theatre to 24 May. Book How to Fight Loneliness tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: How to Fight Loneliness (Photos by Mark Douet)