At 3am in a London flat, two former lovers meet again after ten years apart. In Slippery, written by Louis Emmitt-Stern and directed by Matthew Iliffe, a late-night accident becomes the unlikely catalyst for a reunion neither character seems fully prepared for.
The premise of Slippery is deceptively simple. Jude and Kyle return from A&E after Jude has quite literally slipped. But the fall is clearly more than physical. As the night unfolds in Jude’s stylish London apartment, old wounds, buried desires and carefully maintained illusions begin to surface. What begins like a witty reunion between two exes slowly reveals something more fragile: two people who have spent a decade trying, and failing, to move on.
Both performances carry the play with remarkable ease. John McCrea brings an anxious intensity to Jude, a successful lawyer whose polished lifestyle barely conceals a growing sense of instability. Opposite, Perry Williams plays Kyle with a looser confidence that gradually reveals its own cracks. At first their interaction feels almost like a romantic comedy: flirtatious banter, easy chemistry and the unmistakable sexual tension of two people who know each other extremely well.
Yet the humour gradually gives way to something heavier. As the script peels back its emotional layers, the characters begin to resemble two frightened people trying to confront the consequences of their past. Beneath the teasing and the nostalgia lies a shared recognition that time cannot simply be rewound. The fantasy of returning to who they once were proves painfully fragile.
One of the most effective elements of Slippery is its domestic realism. The set places a functioning kitchen at the back of the stage and a living space at the front, allowing the actors to move naturally through the environment. As onions sizzle in a pan and pasta cooks on the stove, the smell of food drifts through the auditorium. It is a surprisingly immersive detail. Even for an audience that has already eaten dinner, the scent of cooking quietly triggers appetite, a reminder that hunger, in all its forms, rarely disappears so easily.
Food becomes an unspoken parallel to the play’s exploration of desire. Cooking, flirting, arguing and remembering all blur together in the small apartment space. Like appetite itself, attraction lingers even when the relationship that produced it has long since ended.
The staging occasionally sacrifices visibility for realism, with actors sometimes facing away from the audience while moving through the kitchen, but the intimacy of the space largely works in the production’s favour. The focus remains firmly on the performances and the shifting emotional terrain between the two characters.
Ultimately, Slippery is less interested in dramatic resolution than in the uncomfortable honesty of its characters’ situation. There is no miracle reconciliation and no neat emotional cure. Instead the night ends much as life often does: quietly, uncertainly, with both people left to confront the emptiness that follows emotional exhaustion.
In its final moments, Slippery leaves the audience with a lingering sense of stillness, the kind that arrives when anger, nostalgia and longing have finally burned themselves out.
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