Ti is in love and imagines this is happily ever after. Ro’s not feeling it. Five minutes after Ro’s broken the bad news to Ti over the breakfast table in her tiny flat, she gets a text: one of last night’s karaoke group has just tested positive for covid. Cue seven days’ isolation for both of them. Wishbone by Peach Productions skips us through those awkward seven days in a tidy fifty minutes.
Day one of the isolation and Ti’s in bits. Ro’s unapologetic. A smart, funny, economical script from Coco Cattam charts the evolution of their relationship over the subsequent days. Propelled by super performances from Rosa Calcroft (Ti) and Kaitlin Horton-Samuel (Ro), the young women’s relationship stretches thin until it surely must snap – but hangs on by a thread.
Will they, won’t they find that they can spend their futures together after all? Calcroft is hideously petulant and sweetly wistful. Horton-Samuel is relentlessly determined – until she isn’t. Cattam’s closing scene is carefully executed by director Lydia Free and nicely ambivalent.
Born from university then pub theatre in Clapham, the set’s perfectly fit for purpose, though the costumes might benefit from a bit of an explanation. Projections punctuate the storytelling fairly effectively. Some of the footage is so dark as to be more or less impenetrable (though that’s possibly the point) but there’s a fun animated sequence about ravioli that redeems it.
For this (shudder to say it) middle-aged reviewer, the plot’s a bit flimsy and the stakes never feel high enough to wrench hearts, though the titular wishbone contains an idea that has bags of potential. Nevertheless, the writing is so sparkly sharp that it’s a delightful way to spend fifty minutes of your Fringe.