Scenes From a Friendship - Nottingham Playhouse, Review

★★★★☆

At Nottingham Playhouse, Jane Upton’s Scenes from a Friendship arrives as a funny and emotional two-hander about growing up in Nottingham, surviving adulthood, and finding the one person who remembers every version of you. It is packed with laughter, awkward tenderness, and the kind of emotional honesty that catches audiences off guard. The question hanging over the evening is deceptively simple: what happens when friendship becomes the only constant in your life?

Benedict Salter and Katie Redford in Scenes from a Friendship. Photo Credit: Pamela Raith.

The play begins in Long Eaton in the 1980s, where Jess and Billy meet as children and immediately connect. From there, the play jumps through decades of teenage crushes, school plays, underage drinking, and sexual discovery, giving way to diverging adult lives. Jess remains in Nottingham, engaged and reconnecting with theatre after drifting away from it, while Billy heads to London after drama school, proudly phoning home from Elton John’s golden toilet. As time moves on, both become parents under very different circumstances: Jess through a traumatic birth, Billy through same-sex adoption. By the final scenes, they are older, tired, and clinging to each other with the exhausted gratitude of people who have survived themselves.

Upton’s writing is at its sharpest when emotion leaks accidentally through humour. The early scenes are genuinely hilarious. The audience barely has time to recover between punchlines as Jess and Billy fire witty insults and nostalgic observations back and forth like a seasoned sitcom double act. Katie Redford, in particular, has extraordinary comic precision. Every side-eye, every muttered comeback, every shake of the head lands with pinpoint accuracy. Jess feels unmistakably Nottingham-born: funny, defensive, emotionally guarded, and capable of weaponising sarcasm before anyone gets too close. Redford understands that comedy comes from rhythm, and she delivers it brilliantly.

Benedict Salter matches her beat for beat. His Billy is charismatic without turning to campness or caricature. There is sass in the performance, certainly, but Salter never reduces Billy to shorthand. He plays him as a man constantly trying to outrun insecurity through performance, socially, professionally, and emotionally. That becomes especially moving in the later scenes around parenthood and mental collapse. One of the most honest yet comic images in the play was Billy curled up on the grass with a bottle of vodka, emotionally imploding while Jess tries to talk him off the ledge. The production succeeds when it trusts moments like that to do the work.

Katie Redford and Benedict Salter in Scenes from a Friendship. Photo Credit: Pamela Raith.

Unfortunately, that trust occasionally disappears. Upton’s script sometimes explains feelings that the actors are already communicating perfectly well. Billy, explaining he has essentially had a breakdown in a hospital scene, feels dramatically weaker than in the moments where Salter simply allows the audience to witness him unravelling. Jess similarly over-articulates her fears about motherhood in places where Redford’s exhausted physicality already tells the story. The play occasionally becomes too self-aware for its own good. Characters speak with therapeutic clarity about emotions they should probably be struggling to name.

It creates an interesting tonal inconsistency because the opening sections are written with the heightened rhythm of a situational comedy. Jokes arrive with clean setups and polished punchlines. Then, later, the play shifts into something more naturalistic and emotionally raw. The audience adjusts quickly because the performances are strong enough to carry the transition, but the change in voice is noticeable.

Hannah Stone’s direction ensures the production is deeply cohesive. Abby Clarke’s design is deceptively simple: monochrome furniture scattered across an open stage dominated by a tiled wall of hidden Polaroid negatives. Then Alex Musgrave’s lighting pulsates or strobes through the wall, and suddenly decades of memories illuminate behind the actors. It is one of the smartest visual ideas in the production because it mirrors the play’s structure exactly. The past is always there, waiting for the right light to expose it.

Benedict Salter and Katie Redford in Scenes from a Friendship. Photo Credit: Pamela Raith.

Ellie Isherwood’s sound design is sharp. Date-specific music situates certain scenes in a cultural context without feeling like a lazy nostalgia playlist, while evocative tones and camera clicks give the scene transitions clever momentum. The play runs for around ninety minutes without an interval and absolutely flies. Upton’s snapshot structure keeps the storytelling lean and propulsive. The audience leaves feeling they have known these characters for years.

The production also fits perfectly within Upton’s growing body of work. Her previous Nottingham Playhouse play, (The) Woman, stripped away sentimental ideas of motherhood and exposed something messier beneath the surface. Scenes from a Friendship revisits similar territory through traumatic birth and adoption. Upton clearly has a lot to say about parenting, identity, and emotional inheritance, and she writes about them with bruising honesty.

Scenes from a Friendship is exactly the kind of studio theatre piece that audiences remember and recommend to people afterwards. Funny enough to entertain, emotionally intelligent enough to sting, and anchored by two beautifully judged performances, it understands that friendship can sometimes carry more history, pain, forgiveness, and love than romance ever could. Spending ninety minutes with Jess and Billy turns out to be time very well spent, and by the end, you may feel like you’ve made a friendship of your own.