We’ve all met someone on holiday who seemed like a good idea at the time – but after the holiday….
On a cruise, Peter and Debbie Lindel meet Elsa, an outgoing American widow. The holiday ends, but a promise to stay in touch doesn’t. When Elsa announces she’s coming to visit, the Lindels find themselves caught between the woman they remember, the troubling information they find about her online and the rules of British hospitality that make it difficult to tell her what they really think.
Can good manners make you less safe? In The Unfriend, they can. The Lindels’ instinct is to be welcoming, reasonable and polite, even as their unease about Elsa grows. The play finds its comedy in that pressure: the harder the situation becomes to ignore, the more difficult it is for them to say plainly what they think.
The Lindels’ home gives those rules a shape. The set is ordered, composed and ready for respectable domestic life. But there are also small areas of darkness and disarray at its edges. The house’s order is real, but it isn’t complete; some disorder has simply been pushed out of sight. It feels like an apt image for the situation the Lindels find themselves in, trying to maintain a reassuring picture of normality while their home becomes anything but normal.
The uncertainty around Elsa comes from competing versions of who she is. The Lindels have their experience of her on the cruise and in their home. Their children have their own responses to her. Then there is what the Lindels find online: information that appears to offer answers, but which they cannot fully test against the person standing in front of them. None of these perspectives settles the matter. Their first-hand experience is filtered through the pressure to be good hosts; the online version lacks the context of knowing Elsa; and the children offer another view, shaped by their own place in the family. The play makes us watch the Lindels decide what to trust while they struggle to ask the most direct questions.
There is a pointed contradiction in that struggle. The Lindels are troubled that Elsa may not have told them the truth, but they conceal their own feelings to preserve the manners holding the visit together. They want honesty from her while finding honesty with her almost impossible. In this play, politeness is more than a social nicety. It can make the safe thing feel rude, the truthful thing feel like a breach of the rules, and the safe thing socially unsafe.
The production never lets that idea become ponderous. Its humour is broad, dark and beautifully controlled. The literal toilet humour is unapologetically crude, but delivered with enough precision to avoid tipping into juvenile shock. There was room to push it further, perhaps, but the restraint keeps the comedy’s rhythm intact. Dark, cynical humour provides a wicked counterweight to the lightness, and both styles sharpen the absurdity of people trying to preserve decorum as circumstances spiral.
It often feels less like watching theatre than being in the audience for a very funny live sitcom (complientary). The digital opening credits lean into that feeling, as do the performances: the domestic rhythms are instantly recognisable, and the comic timing gives even small exchanges room to land. Ty Arnott and Brooklyn Davis nail the familiar teenage angst and boredom (“Muuuuuuum”); Huw Higginson’s neighbour is wonderfully persistent in his attempt to get one simple job done. These everyday interruptions keep the household’s ordinary social machinery running even as Elsa’s presence threatens to throws it out of balance.
Tim Walter is particularly good as the overly polite Peter, making courtesy feel almost physical: a habit he cannot simply put down. Alex Lee gives Debbie the tightly controlled frustration of someone uptight because “i can’t just kill people”. Helen Thomson captures Elsa’s brashness and her cycles of dark humour with terrific confidence. Ben Wood brings another level of absurdity as PC Junkin, making the production’s comic world feel broader without losing its grip on the domestic setting.
Some extended blackouts, presumably for costume changes, interrupt the momentum. Since the screens establish the language of a sitcom from the outset, could also help bridge these transitions. (And if we get opening credits, where are the end credits?). Even with this, the first act flew by without feeling like an hour, and the second felt as though it was over too quickly. By the end of the first act, I wanted more – which is a lovely problem for a show to have – so the interval felt an unnecessary break in momentum. The material seemed to have enough energy to carry a straight-through run, with the second act folded into the first.
The Unfriend hides sharp social observation inside pure nonsense. It understands that people do not always behave sensibly when the rules of good behaviour are pressing down on them; sometimes they become even more determined to be nice. The result is a hugely enjoyable production that had me dying laughing – or perhaps it was the sandwiches at the after-party. I see you, STC.