After a year that felt like a Dadaist nightmare, returning to the theatre involves the re-evaluation of the things we once took for granted. Naturalism feels suddenly quite surreal. Did we always sit in dark spaces and stare at people who pretended we weren’t there? How strange. Burn This is performed in traverse, which makes good use of the notoriously tricky fortyfivedownstairs space. It is an odd thing, though, to stare past sobbing actors at a bank of silent, masked observers.

Jessica Clarke as Anna in Burn This (Chris Beck)

Transitioning back to live performance asks much of theatre-makers. It isn’t just a matter of masking up and sanitising. Audiences are going through a period of reintegration while they regain their theatre fitness. Burn This occasionally makes this process difficult. It is characterised by rocketing dialogue, which can be bamboozling at times. Partly it’s a matter of difficulty with accents and diction (Diaco especially races through Pale’s Jersey-accented monologues, often prioritising pace over precision); partly it’s the difficulty of re-socialising, remembering how to read people we haven’t spent ten months with.

One of the great joys of being back in the theatre, though, is remembering the things that are unique to live performance: the thud of feet on floorboards, the corporeality of quivering hands and snotty tears, the recoveries from dropped lines, the chemistry. This last quality is a mutable one in Burn This. Diaco and Clarke have surprisingly little spark for much of the first act – the text is so full that they have little space to connect. But when they finally come together in hungry silence, Anna gasping at Pale’s touch, the intimacy is startling. Their first kiss is heartbreakingly tender.

These moments of rest are few and far between in the first act. To some extent this is scripted: Pale and Anna’s scenes are dense with wired speech. Partly, though, it is a matter of direction (Iain Sinclair). Dynamically, much of the act is played at forte. Burn This often aches for moments of nuance, for tighter precision in tonal shifts to stop the text and the emotion from rollercoastering into mush.

When there are moments of quiet, they resound. Many of these belong to Philips, whose Larry occupies the space with a kind of electric languor, both erotic and assured. He and Collins Levy bring wit and subtlety of feeling to their second-act scene together as the men who have long revolved around Anna. This is delicate work, full of gentle detail. Diaco and Clarke’s final scene is similarly, beautifully fragile. When the characters are allowed to be vulnerable, they shine.

There is good work in Burn This. The actors are full of fire, handling Lanford Wilson’s knotty dialogue with relish. Sinclair’s direction in the second act is elegant and meticulous. Jacob Battista’s set melts into the existing space so perfectly that it seems to have always been there. Clare Springett’s lighting seeps through the windows of the theatre, extending the possibility of the production’s world into the alleyway beyond.

Jessica Clarke as Anna and Mark Diaco as Pale in Burn This (Chris Beck)

Much of the difficulty with the production comes from the script itself. Its treatment of the relationship between Anna and Pale jars in front of a contemporary audience. When Burn This premièred in 1987, Pale was an electric lead: complicated and fascinating. The role is sought after, allowing actors to display both edginess and pathos. The script is sympathetic to Pale. It finds his depth, offers him little moments of calm amid his chaos: making a pot of tea with practised care, musing on the cruelty of the job that works him to the bone, genuinely afraid of the size of his feelings for Anna. The second act culminates in Anna throwing Pale out of the warehouse after he punches Burton.

Perhaps in the 1980s, Anna’s outbursts to Pale of ‘I think you’re dangerous’ and ‘I’m frightened of you’ felt less loaded, given Pale’s regular collapses into confused tears. Now, though, the character is troubling, and, in Diaco’s hands, he is often legitimately frightening, full of violent rage. Pale’s drunken aggression, unpredictability and crumbling personal life feel less pitiable, more like red flags. When Anna asks Larry, over and over, whether he’s sure that Pale has left, her repetition doesn’t read as a shift to regret. The fear does not dissipate in the space. Larry’s efforts to bring Anna and Pale together, justified perhaps by Pale’s positive influence on Anna’s choreography, may be alarming to contemporary eyes. In 1987, the ending, which sees Anna and Pale embracing, repeating, ‘I don’t want this’ through ragged sobs, likely left audiences musing on the long arm of grief. In 2021, though, it feels jangly, unsettling. You want to tell them both to get therapy, for god’s sake. You want to tell her to run.

There was probably a time when Burn This might have been read as a meditation on healing. Now, it offers an unsettling story of dysfunction, of the messy lines between violence and pain.

Burn This, produced by 16^th Street Actors Studio, is being performed at fortyfivedownstairs from 26 January to 7 February 2021. Performance attended: January 30.

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.