While a meet-cute around prescriptions and flirty banter about meds may not be on everyone’s bingo card this Fringe season, Amalia Kontesi’s rendition of Jacob Marx Rice’s Chemistry certainly did not disappoint.
The play follows Steph (Kathryn Bates) and Jamie’s (Rowland Stirling) blossoming and explosive love story after an unexpected meeting in their psychiatrist’s waiting room. Kontesi’s direction immerses the audience in a small, intimate space, with minimalist décor and cosy, ambient lighting. Steph and Jamie’s charming, playful relationship is instantly lovable. But they are both really, really going through it.
Loving someone and letting yourself be loved can be tough, especially when your own self-worth is constantly at the mercy… of your own thoughts. Kontesi portrays these tensions beautifully. Moments of joy are contrasted with those of anguish, fear and self-sabotage as the play highlights just how vulnerable love can make you feel. These shifts in pacing, from heartfelt dialogue to internal monologues and spiralling thoughts, and from the warmth of a bed shared with a loved one to the cold stillness of being alone with your demons, span the couple’s time together in a way that reveals the complexity of navigating mental illness, whether that’s by yourself, or with the person who maybe knows you the best.
“I just want you to get back to being you…”
“This is me…”
When sleeping patterns, work schedules, and highs and lows in moods can’t align, when he changes his tie for the seventeenth time, and she is still wearing the same Nirvana T-shirt… sometimes all you can do is ask what flavour ice-cream would hit the spot right now. Sometimes you just need to be there. Sometimes you just need to try and be happy “in that busy, stressed, empty sort of way”.
Bates and Stirling’s performances are believable and endearing and take the audience through all the kinds of tears. Laughter. Elation. Heartbreak. The play feels real. Their relationship feels real. Reconsidering what intimacy and trust mean through scars and doubts, Chemistry takes us on a deep dive into the fluctuating nature of mental illness that affects so many. But that doesn’t make love impossible. We find beauty in the scars, too, even as they open again and again.
We open up, we shut down, we love, we laugh, we cry, we freeze… words fail, and sometimes so do we.
Painful, funny and deeply human, Chemistry is a tender exploration of what happens when two people try to love each other while both battling their own minds.
By Natasha Jane Kennedy
Please note: this performance contains references to mental illness, suicide, self-harm and depression.
Saturday, 16th – Thursday, 21st May, 2026
brightonfringe.org
