An Emotional Journey Through Modern Love: Tender Review

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tender
Image credit: Harry Elletson

★★★

Within the tightly wound drama of Tender, Eleanor Tindall’s new play currently playing in the Bush Theatre’s Studio, are familiar elements of the romcom. Certain well-trodden tropes of that genre are peppered throughout: a meet-cute in a bar, an ongoing will-they-won’t-they dynamic, a boyfriend lingering in the wings thwarting the potential for our heroes to get beyond the friendzone. Despite this, there’s enough originality, paired with strong performances from the two leads to make it work.

Tender tells the story of Ivy and Ash, two 30-ish women based in London (although living at opposite ends in East and West, a distance that’s perhaps significant). After a chance encounter at a night club, their lives quickly become entangled, with Ash turning up at the overpriced café where Ivy works and the rapport striking up from there. We quickly discover that both possess baggage—Ash is being stalked by an ex-boyfriend she moved from Barcelona to get away from while Ivy has a troubled brother to contend with and the aforementioned boyfriend whose ick factor is on the ascent. As they navigate their newfound situationship, ugly truths begin to emerge, and we’re left wondering—romcom style—if they’ll ever get together, or if the mounds of trauma they’re both carrying will sabotage any potential romance.

It’s the type of play that could suffer if the acting wasn’t up to scratch. Fortunately, in Nadi Kemp-Sayfi and Annabel Baldwin, we’re treated to two performances with a great deal of chemistry. They clearly know what to do with the script they’ve been given, delivering lines both comedic and dramatic with dexterity. The play is at its best during exchanges between the two of them rather than the intermittent monologues or scenes with other characters, so it’s fortunate these compose the play’s majority. Funny lines recounting relatable plights of modern Londoners—poky flats and extortionate coffee—are a common source of humour, bound to generate a laugh from any capital dwellers, and the way the two riff off each other as they deliver such lines is a lot of fun to watch.

The Studio at the Bush Theatre is decidedly intimate, so using as few props as possible feels commendable. The curtain at the back is employed to intriguing effect, as is the use of the colour yellow—the stage and its props are completely yellow, the relevance of which becomes clear later on. The choice of a single yellow giant plush object squatting centre-stage, however, is distractingly odd: it sits there like an enormous yellow brain throughout the play. It seems practical, since it stores every other prop effectively inside it, but a table would perhaps suffice, and seeing characters drape themselves across it for various scenes can’t escape feeling unusual in what is otherwise a fairly sobering script.

Other elements of execution don’t land so well. Tender was allegedly written as both a two- or four-actor piece, but in reducing it to the two-actor version, this means Kemp-Sayfi plays one character in Ivy, while Baldwin plays everyone else. Not enough is done to differentiate between the characters when Baldwin adopts her other roles, meaning you’re jerked out of the drama for a moment, preventing you from sufficiently buying into these other characters. Why not add a third cast member or play it entirely through off-screen voiceover? There are other options here that would feel less jarring.

A few plot points don’t quite add up adequately: there’s an abortion and self-harm subplot that feel a touch superfluous, and a twist that feels like a fairly drastic coincidence, asking the audience for a suspension of disbelief that doesn’t feel exactly earned. That said, there’s plenty here to enjoy and the two leads make it worth your time. The team behind the show have broken records with This Might Not Be It earlier in the year, so after that success, so this is a decent show to round off their year with. You can look forward to whatever they have planned in 2025.

Tender will be performed at Bush Theatre until 21 December.

Words by James Morton


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