This article contains spoiler content.
A two-hander can be a delicate thing. At its worst, subjecting the audience to an hour or more of only two identical, underdeveloped characters can result in the audience begging for someone, anyone else to step onto the stage. At its best, however, a two-hander can be more intimate, more thought-provoking, and more entrancing than single-actor plays, as the relationship between two characters becomes almost a character in and of itself.
Marek Horn’s Wild Swimming, here directed by Sofia Shann and Ondine Ryan Law, is thankfully an example of the latter. It’s set on a beach in Dorset, in the year 1603, or 1847, or 1920, or possibly right now. Our protagonists, a pair of young drifters named Nell (Lucy McNulty) and Oscar (Euan Krasinski), find themselves travelling through the centuries and discuss gender politics, literature, sex, the unstoppable forward march of history, and, of course, swimming.
Admittedly, there is quite a lot more to Wild Swimming than that rather glib synopsis would suggest – though this is more so in its characters, performances and production than any kind of plot. Not a lot actually happens, per se – the characters go through their lives, Oscar advancing in his studies and Nell becoming a published poet – but the whole thing hangs together quite nicely even despite this.
There’s a notable shift in tone halfway through, as we transition into the third scene, set just after World War One. Prior to this, the play had been a light-hearted affair, the two characters trading acerbic jabs that only people truly in love could get away with and speaking in clearly modern vernacular. However, once Oscar returns from Gallipoli on a crutch, his leg badly damaged and his psyche even more, the cracks really start to show.
This tonal change is underlined when a broken Oscar tells Nell that the Hellespont, a strait in Turkey that Oscar previously fixated on swimming across, has become the site where he has watched his comrades be massacred. Nell viciously attacks Oscar for treating the sacrifices he has made in the war as means to an end, but Oscar has no shortage of scathing criticism for Nell’s dismissal of him as his own individual person. It’s the most explicit the play ever gets in its exploration of changing gender dynamics throughout history, the rest of the time leaving this to more subtle clues, like how Nell doesn’t get her poetry published until the 1920s.
Maya Mosaku’s design ensures that the stage is sparsely populated for most of the show, with nothing really to denote a beach beyond some picnic-related props. The many clothes the actors change into and out of throughout the show are hung from a deliberately makeshift-looking metal frame that dominates the back of the stage.
The costuming is as period-appropriate as you’d expect, if not more so – whether intentional or not, Nell’s overly-elaborate Victorian dress and Oscar’s puffy Elizabethan sleeves seem like exaggerations of their respective time periods (and their respective genders) that add to the non-naturalism that’s created by the scene transitions, which I would consider the show’s design and direction highlights. As we move between each century, the lights turn harsh shades of blue and red and Nell and Oscar change clothes before stuffing themselves with snacks from a picnic basket while the Four Seasons blares menacingly in the background.
This is another comedic aspect that is harshly subverted after the twentieth century scene, as in a wonderfully metafictional twist that smashes the fourth wall to smithereens, it is revealed that the transitions are not abstract representations of events but have in fact been happening to the characters in real life.
Oscar screams at the lighting operators as the music comes back on, running through the audience to bang on their box, before running offstage, quite literally going off script as Nell is left struggling to continue without him in a delightful encapsulation of their relationship. She runs behind the back curtain and comes out with a battered copy of the script, presumably the actor’s own, along with a set of modern clothes that she changes into.
When Oscar returns she attempts to get him to do the same, but he instead frantically changes into what he was wearing at the beginning, trying desperately to return to the past while Nell watches on, horrified. It’s a powerful scene, and one that wouldn’t work if the characters hadn’t been properly communicated to the audience prior to it.
Speaking of, Nell and Oscar are the glue that hold the whole show together. They are an incredible pair, Oscar’s meekness and pretentious literary analysis making him the perfect foil to Nell’s relentless taunting. Even prior to the mid-play tonal change, Oscar is still able to grow a spine and knock Nell off her game every now and then, and these are the moments where the genuine grievances they hold against each other (beyond childish insults about penis size) come to the fore.
Both are perfectly casted, too – Euan Krasinski excels as Oscar, particularly in the second half of the play, shouting down Nell with a real venom that perfectly contrasts with the wit and warmth of the earlier scenes. Lucy McNulty, too, is given a more comedic character and rises to the task with distinction. She brings fantastic comic timing to the show and elevates jokes that would already be funny on their own. The pair have an easy, natural chemistry that makes both their playful joking and fierce arguments feel equally visceral, and their performances in the final scene, as Nell comforts a broken Oscar refusing to enter the twenty-first century, are superb.
Wild Swimming is fantastic from front to back: a resolutely entertaining eighty minutes that runs the gamut between charming comedy and disarmingly genuine drama, it develops its characters perfectly and the performances, direction and visual design are outstanding, never losing sight of its core themes. It floats and it sinks, it breathes and it drowns, and it leaves the audience doing the same.
