It doesn’t look like much: the stage is tiny, the set is a single room, spare and compact, and there are only two characters, Him and Her. Yet writer-director dkfash makes By Their Fruits feel deep and dense, and wide and open – as if reaching into the ground beneath and the sky above that central relationship.
Him and Her (winningly played by Ivan Oyik and Reba Ayi-Sobsa) are quite a pair, taking swipes at each other and making up, enjoying then falling out over the games they play – not in a toxic, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf way, but with heart and soul and humour. And body too: their language is as much physical as verbal, full of stances and glances, their touches, swerves, brush-offs and embraces enforcing or contradicting the words they speak. The action is often freewheelingly funny, and sexy too (they may argue a lot, but they’re definitely hot for each other). It’s as if dkfash observes all these dynamics with the benevolent, non-judgmental eye of a couples therapist, even as she scripts them with the relish of a drama director.
The couple dynamics, though, are just one element of story and style. The already heightened body language breaks out into scenes of physical theatre and choreography: Oyik pikes his limbs into alienating angles, hands masking his face as if they were someone else’s; a high-five greeting evolves into a whole dance of pressing and pulling. Elsewhere, sentences soar into different registers, waxing poetic, or philosophical, or becoming almost biblical in reach and reference. The set, its lights changing colours and throwing shades, takes on a metaphorical quality, as if the characters were wandering through the doors and rooms of their own minds.
All this could have been a mess, but in fact feels boldly multidimensional. Along with Him and Her, we sense the ghostly yet vital presence of “people who don’t exist”: unseen and perhaps imaginary rivals in love, dead parents whose secrets remain very much alive; an unborn baby. The show may take place in a small room, but it’s a big wide world in there.
• At Theatre 503, London, until 30 November
