Two best friends. Online dating nightmares. A-coming-of-terms-story of friendship and love in You Have A Match.
Two Girls and a Bottle of Savvy B: These are Anuschka Rapp and Zoe Woodruff. Their encounter proves fruitful culminating in their first show together You Have A Match. Both wrote and perform in the new writing piece which premiered at The Bread & Roses Theatre and was directed by Rachel Lee.
Tegan (Zoe Woodruff) and Riley (Anuschka Rapp) are best friends since school and walk together through the world of frustrating, dreadful and hurtful first dates and hook ups of their 20s. The width of diverse online platforms with its caricatural male users is Tegan’s speciality, whereas Riley has various meaningless sexual relationships with other women. Both are nevertheless still searching for love and can only find comfort in sharing their stories with each other. When they both escape their daily life and travel to Mexico, this experience shines new light on their friendship.
Rapp and Woodruff are a well-coordinated and a well-connected team on stage. They both energise each other and thus the audience with their wit and expressivity. The characters Tegan and Riley are convincingly written and performed as they display and unravel the comedic mask of pretence offering glimpses into the character’s psyche and development throughout. Moments of comedy merge with profundity inviting the audience into the shared life of Tegan and Riley where gossip collides with intimate sharing and teasing with confrontations. The characters present the lightness constituting a close friendship, which can transform an awkward or even devastating experience in an exciting story to laugh about in order to cope with the past and present.
Even though the connection with each other and the audience is established, the direction of speech seems lost sometimes. A clear decision needs to be taken if the speech is directed at each other or the audience. The option to talk to an imaginary person in a retelling sequence blurs the clarity of great moments of the characters and should only be directed at the audience. Furthermore, the great use of the stage and establishment of change of places sometimes need to be more synchronised in order to fully achieve the transformational and comedic effect within the story. However, for example the airplane scene is superb in consideration of using the auditorium as plane cabin. Additionally, although the characters are convincingly embodied by Rapp and Woodruff, they both need to be careful to not slide into a stereotyped slapstick presentation of the character’s contours.
The founders of the emerging company Two Girls and A Bottle of Savvy B present a throughout enjoyable, entertaining and thought-provoking tale of two young women in the midst of entangling the chaos of life and love, loneliness and longing, and pretence and truth. The balance between elements of comedy and profundity is refreshing and inviting.
You Have A Match explores the line between friendship and love and between routine and risk-taking. This play is an important portrayal of taking charge and being true to oneself and one another. It is an empowering tale created and delivered by two feminists who take charge of their own creative career.

You Have A Match played The Bread & Roses Theatre until the 21st of April. For more information and tickets, see https://www.breadandrosestheatre.co.uk/you-have-a-match.html