The Telegraph

The Ringtone of Truth

1 March 2006

COMPULSIVE e-mail-checkers, web-surfers, computer-game addicts, people married to there mobile phones and even those who palpitate with fear every time their office photocopier malfunctions should make a beeline for Laura Wade’s supersmart new play about technological dependence.

Wade, a 28-year-old from Sheffield who has scooped the Critics Circle Awards Most Promising Playwright gong, confirms her promise here by dexterously tapping into the way that relationships and identities are being adversely affected by our slavery to the ubiquitous machine.

I doubt there’s any scientific research to prove her suggested link between an increase in gadget-use and a downturn in personal well-being, but Other Hands has the unmistakeable ringtone of truth about it. And if her prognosis is bleak, Wade writes with such humanising wit, warmth and tenderness as to give one immediate cause for comfort.

Fresh from her success as Esther in Bleak House, Anna Maxwell Martin plays Hayley, a management consultant whose cool, rather ruthless composure at work belies the mess of her eight-year relationship with Steve, an IT handyman who has dropped out of his full-time job and is suffering from an RSI-like ailment that’s slowly crippling his hands.

Just as Hayley begins a flirtatious liaison with Greg, the head of the company she’s scrutinising, so Steve starts to dally with Lydia, a sad, unemployed singleton in the Bridget Jones mould whose laptop he’s called out to mend.

By a neat piece of dramatic circuitry, it turns out that Lydia was fired from her last job by Hayley and that Hayley too is succumbing to mystery motor-skill afflictions.

If the play has a fault, it is that it is too brazen in its symbolism about modern-day disconnectedness, but Wade has got such a keen ear for painful comedy of every speech, at corporate level and between couples, that the ideas slot into place without undue force. When Maxwell Martin’s crumbling career woman asks her neglectful, X-box-fixated partner (Richard Harrington). “D’you think we can fix this?”, the remark feels entirely warranted, however thematically resonant.

Guided by director Bijan Sheibani, the quartet of performances are as sleek and polished as Paul Burgess’s minimalist, grey-slab interior. But each carries an undertone of raw desperation. Somehow even in her nasal monotone, the always excellent Katherine Parkinson as the sweetly technophobic Lydia unlocks a welter of urban insecurities – this is where it’s @.

The Independent

Young professionals: there is hope

Published: 26 February 2006

I take it back. Last week I was bewailing the current lack of outstanding new plays, and now here is one. Laura Wade's contemporary four-hander about souring long-term relationships and RSI (repetitive strain injuries) is very ordinary in a way that proves remarkably touching. In Bijan Sheibani's beautifully acted production, Anna Maxwell Martin's Hayley is a management consultant who, behind the brisk front, is chronically unhappy with her boyfriend, Richard Harrington's Steve. He has become casually hooked on computer games at home and is barely scraping a living as a freelance IT expert. As their relationship malfunctions, they are each tempted to have affairs: Hayley with a businessman, Michael Gould's aggressive then ardently obsessed Greg; Steve with Katherine Parkinson's potentially creepy yet oddly endearing Lydia, a lonely, laid-off secretary who calls him out to her bedsit because her laptop is on the blink.

The set is predominantly grey and the scenario may sound it too. But Wade takes you by surprise with chinks and chasms of vulnerability suddenly appearing in people's armour. The symbolic crippling of Hayley and Steve - both suffering from RSI, their fingers agonisingly seized up - is poignant and surprisingly not heavy-handed. Individual scenes are neatly clipped while the overarching structure stretches out to hopes of healing.

To 11 March, 0870