Lungs

A conversation is started, between a couple, about having a baby. This daunting topic leads to more conversations — arguments — about climate change, what constitutes a 'good person', the purpose of one's life. If you really cared about the environment, would having a child — that's 10,000 tonnes of CO2 — be a responsible thing to do?

Duncan Macmillan's Lungs lets us peer into the relationship between a couple trying to take the next step in their lives. Actors Kate Atkinson and Bert LaBonté, for the most part, are believable together; we see their arguments consistently take the same turns, in that way they do when you know somebody really well. Atkinson's anxious thinking out loud and LaBonté's well-meaning bumbling are both slightly irritating to watch and painfully relatable. Clare Watson's natural direction makes us feel like we're eavesdropping on real people having real conversations: stuttered, rambling, overlapping. Despite all the drama, the dialogue elicits plenty of laughter, taking surprising turns.

Time is marked brilliantly with the use of lights, and the slow rotation of Andrew Bailey's brilliant set, which ramps up the tension tenfold as we anticipate the loud dropping of props, and reiterates the play's notion that everything circles back around in some way. Lungs is as much about destruction — of the planet, of birth, of the set, of a relationship — as it is about beginnings. Despite an unnecessary epilogue, Lungs ultimately stays with you in the way that those niggling thoughts about the human condition and the universe sometimes keep you up at night.