Actually review – two sides of the story about a date gone wrong

In Photograph 51, Anna Ziegler attacked the marginalisation of Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to uncovering the structure of DNA. Her new play is a more equivocal affair about the difficulty of determining what happens between people in bed.

But while I admire Ziegler’s intellectual open-mindedness, her writing undeniably favours one of her two characters.

Tom and Amber are in their first term at Princeton. He is a young, black piano student who combines sexual swagger with social apprehension; she is an awkward English major from a traditional Jewish background. When Amber tells a friend she was “almost raped” by Tom on a drunken date, her charge is referred to an academic inquiry. Mixing monologue and dialogue, Ziegler has Tom and Amber state their sides of the case and allows us to decide where the truth lies. The difficulty in coming to any conclusion is that we learn far more about Tom than Amber. We hear about her closeness to her mum and the loss of her virginity to a family friend, but we get an infinitely more vivid account of Tom’s passion for Mozart, of his nervous arrival at Princeton and of his pursuit by a gay Asian student.

Oscar Toeman’s production can’t rectify that imbalance but is sharply performed. Simon Manyonda catches Tom’s mix of arrogance and insecurity and Yasmin Paige shows how Amber’s shyness manifests itself in compulsive chatter.

Although Ziegler raises the question of how to define the point at which sex ceases to be consensual and suggests that campus committees are inadequate to the purpose, her play does little to clarify a burning issue.