Ever tried a cigarette and chocolate in tandem? Don’t bother: it’s pretty horrific. Cigarettes and Chocolate, Anthony Minghella’s meditation upon silence, is more exquisite encounter, dealing with thought-provoking post-absurdist notions of human interaction. To summarise: the play focuses on the varying reactions of Gemma’s friends to her sudden and mysterious vow of silence. Giving up speech is, apparently, better than giving up cigarettes and chocolate, and as we soon realise, casts the protagonist as a blank slate upon which people are able to ruthlessly project their own personalities.

Tamzin Merchant was a fragile and fierce Gemma, whose silence seemed continuously precarious, and yet in her theft of the show, other actors were exposed to falter. There was a certain desperation in their creation of self-absorbed stereotypes, each wildly different in the endeavor for a different reaction to be elicited from Gemma’s silence. Lines were often splurged out erratically; I wasn’t persuaded that they hadn’t just spent a couple months learning how to recite at high speed. Perhaps it was a nod to the value of the things that are left unsaid in human contact, but my impression was that they all needed to relax into their roles, and shake off the visible awareness that they were giving a performance in a play sceptical of speech. Only “rich and pregnant” silences, we are told, pierce through modern society’s excessive verbiage, and it was in such silences upon stage that the magic of this production emerged.

Three distinct spaces upon the stage (a trattoria, an office, an armchair) provided a triad of tensions, exacerbated by Gemma, stoic in the chair throughout. She posed a poignant and witty reflection to the silent and watching audience, and such subtleties slotted well with the ambiguities of Minghella’s script, in which Gemma’s silence is never entirely justified: whispers of an Italian holiday and a young child give the play a dreamlike texture. If only the performances were as sweet as the silences. nick chapman