LONG DISTANCE at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★
“the dialogue is funny, elastic and fizzles with energy”
Contemporary living, for most, has become inextricably intertwined with technology. It crops up in more and more places, knitting segments of our lives together. In Long Distance, the phone is the connective tissue between two young queers – and the lens through which we understand them and their relationship to each other. As the play travels from meet-cute to breakup, the pair exchange text messages at significant moments in their relationship, slowly discovering more about each other.
Strong writing by playwright and director Eli Zuzovsky keeps the pace up and drops tantalizing details at appropriate intervals. The play leads its audience along the contours of the relationship, structured well to maintain an interest. Despite its static staging – the two characters never touch and look out at the fourth wall for most of the play – the dialogue is funny, elastic and fizzles with energy. Texting’s pitfalls are well documented by awkward misreadings, cringey innuendo, and awkward silences.
That energy is ably parried by the two lead performances. Jonathan Rubin crafts a stunning journey throughout the play, creating a fully formed character despite his dialogue being limited to text messages. It is a performance filled with depth and intention, and admirably executed in so much silence – each gasp, tremble, or knitted brow shares more and more about the character. Freddie MacBruce, stepping in last minute to help the show go on, is a remarkable foil – assured yet unconfident, he holds all the tensions of his character at once. The textures of the actor’s voices create a beautiful quality to the play – Rubin’s flitting vulnerability crashes into and hugs MacBruce’s nonchalant solidity. Though their dynamic starts to sink into stereotype by the end of the play, both performances remain strong, detailed, and truthful throughout.
The play has mined the possibilities of presenting text messages on stage – one of its most interesting elements is the tension between the inherently nondescript act of texting and the detail that live theatre, with all its elements, provides. Occasionally the tension jars – in translating texts for the stage, some believability is lost. There are incongruous transitions into monologues which reveal further interiority but clash against the naturalism the play seems to strive for – the drawn-out silence and resultant confusion created by a phone dying, our reliance on emojis and gifs and memes to communicate how we feel.
Long Distance is an interesting and evocative meditation on our phones and how they help and hinder us in communicating with each other. The play deliberately obscures the central relationship, limiting the couple’s interaction to the online realm. We never experience how, or if, the two interact in person. The play asks whether that is a problem at all. Is authenticity obstructed by an online setting? Perhaps not, but what the play does make clear is our increasing reliance on digital communication to connect us to those we love – and it is a timely reminder to reflect and reassess how we think about that mode of communication in our lives. A thought-provoking and timely play, Long Distance is a sobering and affecting experience.
LONG DISTANCE at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – ZOO Playground – Playground 1
Reviewed on 22nd August 2024
by Theo Chen
Photography by Lidia Crisafulli
LONG DISTANCE
LONG DISTANCE
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