Shifters review: ‘friends without benefits’

Yet for anyone who has seen Nick Payne’s Constellations, a sense of been-here-seen-that gathers. And once it is there it never goes away. In both works timelines criss-cross like Clapham Junction train tracks.

Chef Dre and artist Des have been soulmates since childhood. They can finish each other’s sentences and segue into each other’s cultures. His is Nigerian, her’s Congolese. Both are London and raised in the same streets, breathing the same humour, visiting each other’s childhood house even though economically they hail from different sides of the tracks.

Heather Agyepong and Tosin Cole as Des and Dre[Missing Credit]

“Your house could have given birth to my house,” says Dre betraying some of the insecurity that leads him to think he will never be good enough for Des even though we know he is. The two just “get” each other in the way that only people meant for each other really do. But the skill of Linton’s rom-com is that it keeps the couple in the friend zone even as every involuntary signal announces they both escape it.

Lynette Linton’s production, which was first seen at the Bush Theatre, is as surefooted as Lombe’s script. Yet after the lion’s share of this uninterrupted 100-minute show has elapsed, the will-they-won’t-they tension seeps out of the evening like sand in an egg timer. Alex Berry’s hovering nest of intersecting neon lines under which the actors perform does a good job of illustrating what Dre declares right at the beginning: that lives and stories are not linear. Some scenes are repeated. Others have the sense of an alternate sliding doors-like reality. But unlike Payne’s love story there is no scientific impetus for this, just the poetic licence that Lombe and Linton award themselves. Our ache for the two to get together is as much get it over with as it is to see love blossom.