In an age when female erotica has become the vogue genre of easy reading, it is unsettling to be reminded of the power of its predecessor in popular literature: the domestic drama. Richard Cameron’s production of Richard Bickley’s Uncoupled provides just such a reminder. A fifty minute monologue delivered in the intimacy of The Gilded Balloon’s aptly named Wee Room, Uncoupled is one woman’s reflective thoughts on marriage and sex – how much her and her husband loved one another, and how inexplicably their love fell away.
Rosa is the vanilla middle-class housewife: thoughtful and sacrificial, and a participating member of the ordered world. Adam is the expected counterpart of such a woman, a man who discourages his wife from working, but is - generally speaking - supportive and kind. Yet, despite the reassuring averageness of their marriage, small discoveries and revelations progressively distance the pair until they descend from wedded love into mere cohabitation. Their story becomes one about the silent wars waged in suburbia.
Perhaps some of this sounds familiar - especially to those well-acquainted with the film Revolutionary Road or the novels of Jonathon Franzen - and there is an element of predictability to the play’s motifs. Even so, putting the concept into monologue format is new and works well. Louise Templeton does an impeccable job inhabiting the role of Rosa. She delivers the monologue flawlessly, mastering the art of naturalism and making the story seem like a real and spontaneous act of recounting. She effortlessly simulates conversations with Adam. She even looks the part of the charming Rosa, something that undoubtedly gives her the quiet confidence she demonstrates in her ability to make eye contact with the audience - even when it is populated by wayfaring reviewers and their conspicuous scribblings.
The quality of Templeton’s performance and the appropriateness of the location and sparse set all provide solid bases for this production of Bickley’s play - and a good play it is too, full of all the terror that comfortable paralysis invokes. The show lived up to its hype, doing its bit for the Fringe by providing intelligent material that nevertheless keeps its happy audiences engrossed.
