Review by Simon Jenner,March 26th 2025
Three women meet, only two at a time. After four café encounters returning to the original pairing, circularity mimics uncanny repeats in their lives. Did they all know a different boyfriend who created intimate crossword puzzles as his most romantic gesture? Mark O’Rowe’s 2018 The Approach is directed by Mark Wilson who also designed the minimal set. It plays at New Venture Theatre, Brighton, till March 29th.
Charly Sommers. Photo Credit: Elysa Hyde
O’Rowe’s best known for dramatising Sally Rooney’s Normal People with Alice Birch. There’s something of that feel here. To a haunted piano piece – Yann Tierson’s ‘Porz Goret’ – Cora (Charly Sommers) meets Anna (Samantha Ferree) for tea: Strat Mastoris’ gleam of daylight playing on a table with cups or glasses in a winter-lit cafe. Chris Dent’s sound envelope is equally deft.
It’s clear there’s an elephant – Denise – in the room. A language both beguilingly naturalist and litanic with echoes, the drama, once 60 minutes (the Guardian-acclaimed online performance in 2021) spools out over about 78.
Motifs emerge as the first three ‘approaches’ happen over two winters and a summer. The last seems three years later. Here “approach” is loaded with ambiguity, reachings-out. A mutual schoolfriend Emily never made adulthood: quite when isn’t clear. For these women it doesn’t need to be; so their intimate elisions tease. Emily’s once-glamorous mother looks terrible now but why repeat it? And Emily’s unexplained act recalled in the last encounter raises the accidentals of life to a poetry of bafflement and wonder.
Charly Sommers. Photo Credit: Elysa Hyde
Anna can never forgive Denise. Another link between Anna and Denise emerges. When Cora meets Denise (Sophie Dearlove) she mirrors Anna’s fury. Anna had finished with now-dead Oliver in a sexually intense relationship. Denise took him up, but when? Anna refused to go to the funeral. Denise wasn’t so in love though; she prefers Wayne, though it’s not so passionate. Anna’s recollections shift, meeting Cora in the final tableau. Cora starts as gentle prompt, but in the last it’s Anna asking questions. Peacemaker Cora telegraphs her life. An intense relationship with Noah describes its arc. Cora’s dog ages.
Was the sex always intense but memories of love ever-shifting? Men come and go, Denise talks of missing sex but agrees “even the euphoria” is just too much. All recall as students, talking into a summer dawn, a pivotal moment radiant with possibilities.
Over four meetings partners shift loyalties subtly; declarations they’ll meet again soon. The third has “Saturday” firmed up, but there’s reason. A reference in the second meeting states the first couple met subsequently. Unspoken elisions show how we recreate our past. There’s a suggestion memories are taken over, or become communal: a hive-mind of three. Or every romance comes with a personal crossword attached.
Photo Credit: Elysa Hyde
Samantha Ferree. Photo Credit: Elysa Hyde
With Gerry McCrudden’s voice-coaching accents are faultless, never over-emphasised: I speak as growing up in Dublin. Sommers is consummate as gently courageous Cora: wanting to reconcile two people with deep bonds. Sommers invokes something withheld in Cora’s low self-image – her refusal to be flattered over her intelligence around a book-reading club.
Ferree compels with Anna’s blasé humour and warmth, steeled whenever Denise is mentioned: clear logic and settled opinions yet sashayed painlessly. All the while Ferree teases out Cora’s life. And like Dearlove’s downright Denise, conveys sudden self-knowledge. Dearlove too as an unbuttoned, late mother has expectations of a family transformed, partly relayed in a dream. Denise too feels wronged; though it’s a surprise to see how implacable she seems. But life changes her, there’s unspoken fragility.
Pitch-perfect, a beautifully distilled world. A gem.
Photo Credit: Elysa Hyde
Sophie Dearlove and Charly Sommers. Photo Credit: Elysa Hyde
Production Manager Tamsin Mastoris
Stage Manager David Turton, Ayshen Irfan
Lighting Design Strat Mastoris & Chris Dent
& Lighting Operation Sabrina Giles & Alex Epps
Sound Design Chris Dent
Costume Design: Sourced by cast
Accent Coach Gerry McCrudden
Script Prompt Bex Suter
Poster Tamsin & Strat Mastoris
Programme Tamsin Mastoris
Photography Strat Mastoris, Elysa Hyde
Publicity Elysa Hyde
Theatre Props Guy Dixon
Health and Safety Ian Black.
Many thanks to Simon Glazier, Ms E Plumbridge (Transport), and Box Office FOH and Volunteers
Poster Henry Lindfield, Programme Ian Amos
Publicity Photography Kelly Garcia, Julian Beresford, Publicity Elysa Hyde, Health and Safety Ian Black.
Many thanks to Ian Amos, Marian Drew, and Box Office FOH and Volunteers
Photo Credit: Elysa Hyde.