We Had Fun

We Had Fun sees Oscar and Ella become trapped in an elevator after a night together, each remembering what happened very differently, while the audience is left to work out where the line between miscommunication, coercion and consent actually sits.

Oscar and Ella’s night is repeatedly reconstructed, but from different points of view. What first seems an awkward story its aftermath eventually becomes something darker, with each retelling encouraging us to shift our sympathies. Oscar genuinely believes himself innocent because that is the version of events he has written into his own mind, while Ella becomes increasingly convinced that she was forced. “You are making me feel like a predator,” Oscar tells her, as the stakes become more immediate.

The production's most interesting device is the way these memories are performed around the two of them. The pair’s friends transform into interpretive dancers, recreating their words in abstract and concrete action. Each version therefore becomes its own separate world, with neither quite offering an objective account. At its best, the movement makes those competing recollections visible; at other points, I was less convinced. The words are already doing a great deal of the work, and some of the re-enactments feel more elaborate than the question requires.

The writing is strongest when it lets that uncertainty sit. Oscar’s “You are making me feel like a predator” sits uneasily against his later accusation that “You are the reason real victims aren't believed”. Neither settles the argument, and “I'll be quick. It's okay” leaves a darker impression when heard in the context of Ella's account. I wanted more of that doubt to be sown from the beginning.

What initially feels like the logistics of two people trying to work out the source of their awkwardness gradually takes on another meaning as the night is reconstructed. The production does eventually make us reconsider what we thought we were watching, but the doubt arrives rather late. There is a good idea here, and an uncomfortable one. It just needed a little more trust in the question at its centre.

We Had Fun by KT Consent CIC. Credit Megan Goldsman.