'Tender' review — this quietly astonishing thriller is tough-minded and terrific

Read our review of Tender, starring Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and Nadi Kemp-Sayfi, now in performances at the Bush Theatre to 1 August.

Summary

• Tender returns to the Bush Theatre
• Eleanor Tindall's play features the intertwining lives of two women and morphs into a thriller
• Nadi Kemp-Sayfi and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers are a riveting duo

A fleeting encounter outside a club prompts the action of Tender, Eleanor Tindall’s quietly astonishing two-hander that is actually written for a cast of four. First seen at the Bush’s studio theatre late in 2024, the play and Emily Aboud’s superb production deserve this current promotion to the main stage, this time with Francesca Amewudah-Rivers – Tom Holland’s recent Juliet in the West End – taking over as a solitary-seeming receptionist called Ash.

Returning to the role of the self-harming Ivy, with whom Ash falls in love, an open-faced Nadi Kemp-Sayfi completes an entirely riveting duo who deftly navigate the gatheringly dark pathways of Tindall’s script. Whereas one can imagine the easy-viewing romcom version of this same tale, Tindall has no time for such niceties. She opts instead for a story about two people crowded out of their own lives who come to know a pain that – in one instance – is quite literally eviscerating. (A particular moment of stage business late on is not for the squeamish.)

The play begins with competing narratives. We learn of Ivy’s domestic set-up with her unseen boyfriend Max and her work life at the cafe where she delivers (overpriced, it would seem) coffees and pastries to Ash. Quieter and more withdrawn, Ash is on the run from a former fiancé who is calling her constantly with stalker-like insistence.

Their stories over time conjoin in ways that can’t be revealed here, as the billowing fabric along the back wall of Alys Whitehead’s set pulsates in keeping with the tremulous emotions of newfound love. There’s also a foetal suggestion that allies with the material, just as the title itself references both an emotional quality and a way of serving up meat: something, significantly, that Ivy doesn’t eat. (On the ingestion front, there’s a remarkable moment in which Ash gives Ivy her number, only for Ivy to start chewing the piece of paper which she then spits out.)

Men loom large but are voiced throughout by Ash, as if to suggest a world closing in on two people who risk various kinds of suffocation. And time and again, Tindall’s language itself excites. Ash speaks, to comic effect, of putting on a BBC crime drama so that she can “calm down”, only to admit elsewhere of her trips alone to the pub that such outings are “all solo – except when they’re not”.

At times, Amewudah-Rivers cuts so casual a presence that she risks being overshadowed by her more febrile colleague: the performance could ramp up near the start in both volume and energy. But once the women find themselves intertwining in ways that take them both by surprise – all credit here to not one but two intimacy directors – you’re gripped by the thriller of sorts that Tender against expectation turns out to be. (Ellie Isherwood's sound design is crucial to the prevailing affect, as well.)

London plays an important role in a play that communicates the extent to which an urban existence can be both crushingly lonely and scarily connected. I like, too, the way that Tindall takes anticipated clichés and turns them on their head. “I don’t know how to be,” confesses Ivy, who has no time for such platitudes as “be yourself”.

Elsewhere, a conversation about identity ends with the realisation that we often can’t fully articulate who we are. The play is explicitly bloody, to be sure, but its psychic abrasions are what really land. The play's name notwithstanding, Tender is tough-minded to its core – and terrific.

Tender is at the Bush Theatre to 1 August. Book Tender tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Tender (Photos by Harry Elletson)