Graceland review

It starts like any conventional romcom, but this new play by Ava Wong Davies is a lethally precise anatomising of abuse, so stealthy that the word itself is never actually used. A solo drama, it subtly unpicks the ways in which a relationship, begun in instant attraction and giddy infatuation, is predicated on power imbalance, manipulation and toxic psychological games. In a meticulously controlled, quietly horrifying production by Anna Himali Howard and Izzy Rabey, Sabrina Wu is absorbing as a young British-Chinese Londoner desperately struggling to maintain her balance and cling on to herself while the emotional terrain beneath her feet keeps shifting. It is not an unfamiliar story, but its subtlety and growing sense of dread have an insidious potency.

Mydd Pharo’s design evokes a claustrophobia-tinged unease: a bedroom with faded wallpaper, a tatty divan and duvet, with incongruous piles of dirt against the walls and scrubby patches of grass on the floor. It is a sordid secret domestic battlefield that ultimately becomes streaked with filth. Nina and Gabriel – although we don’t learn his ironically angelic name until the play’s final moments – meet-cute at a barbecue. She has grown up running around her parents’ restaurant and now has a McJob as receptionist; he is a strikingly good-looking white poet with the self-assurance of wealth. She makes a clumsy joke, claiming that her only career ambition is to be a “kept woman” – and it is the cue Gabriel needs. In a single unguarded moment, she has offered him power, and he takes it.
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