Tender review: Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and Nadi Kemp-Sayfi are electric at Bush Theatre

Eleanor Tindall's Bush Theatre revival pairs two electric performances with a set that pulses like a living thing, though not every choice in the room matches their intensity.

Tender does not open with its love story. It opens with Ivy at sixteen, hands covered in blood, describing how she cuts pieces of herself out and hides them in the walls of her bedroom. An estate agent paces the same room years later, oblivious, selling Ash a flat with bad bones and a wall that will not stay quiet. Only after that do we get the lighter outside the club, the coffee shop, the slow pull of two women toward each other. Tindall builds the wound first and the romance after, and that order matters. You watch them fall in love already knowing what it might cost.

Nadi Kemp-Sayfi and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers are the reason this production earns its title. Their chemistry is not performed, it is felt, and it builds slowly and honestly rather than being handed to the audience all at once. Kemp-Sayfi gives Ivy a restlessness that keeps shifting under your feet, someone trying to be easy and warm for everyone around her while something else churns underneath. Amewudah-Rivers plays Ash calmer on the surface, but you can see her working to keep the rest of herself shut. Watching them fall for each other, shy and unsure at first, then certain, is one of the most tender and true depictions of queer intimacy London has staged in a long while.

Director Emily Aboud deserves real credit for how that intimacy actually lands in the room. Holding the earlier scenes back, letting Ivy and Ash circle each other rather than collide, is a directing choice as much as a writing one, and it pays off. The stranger, more surreal turns of the play could easily have tipped into silliness, but Aboud plays them completely straight, which is why they land.

What struck me most is how Tindall writes the wreckage both women carry, the exes, the fear, the weight of what they are allowed to be, without turning the play into another exercise in misery for its own sake. So much theatre and film right now seems to compete over how bleak it can get, until you leave the room lower than when you walked in. Tender does not do that. It looks straight at fear, shame and violence, and still leaves you with something to hold on to. That is a rare and difficult balance, and this production gets it right.

The design choices are where the real craft shows, and Aboud's hand is all over how they're used. Alys Whitehead's set looks simple at first, but every object in it is doing quiet work. The wallpaper along the back wall breathes and pulses through the whole show, and it becomes mesmerising, one of those details you keep coming back to with your eyes even mid scene. Flowers fall at just the right beats. A mirrored pool catches the light and slowly shows streaks of blood after a wound, so quietly you might miss it the first time, and catching it rewards whoever is paying attention. The bed itself holds a hidden mass of flowers waiting to be let loose, and when that moment comes it lands.

Ellie Isherwood's sound design does similar work, matching the feeling of nearly every scene. Where the production loses some of its sharpness is the lighting. David Doyle's design has good ideas, but it needed to go further. Too often the light sits low or gets lost in the set's own shapes, the column, the base of the bed, when it should be picking the actors out and holding the space fully in their high and low moments. A production built this carefully around intimacy needed its light to isolate that intimacy and dim everything else around it. As it stands, too many scenes sit at the same level, which flattens some of the peaks Tindall is reaching for.

The other choice that did not work for me was casting Amewudah-Rivers to also voice Max and Cas on mic. It is a clever idea on paper, a world closing in around two women through the same voice, but in the room it feels disorienting rather than unsettling. It pulls focus away from the central relationship at exactly the moments the play needs full commitment to it.

None of that takes away from what this production gets so right. Tender is proof that queer stories on stage do not need to end in despair to be taken seriously, and it does not shy away from difficulty to get there. It simply refuses to let difficulty be the whole story. This is the rare play I want to go back to, not to catch what I missed, but just for the joy of watching two such tender, talented actors again. Maybe that is the point. Even the people who insist they are not looking for something tender are usually the ones looking hardest.

Credits:

‍Writer: Eleanor Tindall

Director: Emily Aboud

Cast: Nadi Kemp-Sayfi (Ivy), Francesca Amewudah-Rivers (Ash, also Max and Cas)

Set and Costume Designer: Alys Whitehead

Lighting Designer: David Doyle

Sound Designer: Ellie Isherwood

Venue: Bush Theatre, running to 1 August

Running time: approximately 90 minutes, no interval

Rating: 4.5/5

TICKETS at bushtheatre.co.uk