Tonight I’m Gonna Be the New Me (Soho Theatre)

Aren’t relationships great? You’ve always got someone by your side, someone who knows you better than anyone else – your innermost secrets, your grottiest habits; someone that wants to show you off to the world and call you their own and be there for ever and ever. God, aren’t relationships awful?

Made In China – real-life couple Jessica Latowick and Tim Cowbury – tease out those opposing urges of coupledom: the desire to fold yourself entirely into the other person until two become one and the impulse to break free and run, run for the hills, emigrate if necessary, pray for your partner’s death, anything to escape them and own your own life again. Every relationship is a love-hate relationship, you see. No point pretending otherwise.

It works like this: Jess is onstage, Tim’s off, but still visible in the lighting box. He wrote the words and he’s opping the lights. Every nice thing she says about him, well, it rings a bit hollow as a result. When she idly imagines his death, it’s hardly surprising that it’s a heroic, selfless and sudden. He controls what she says and, just as important, how she looks: a sexy purple glow here, a bit of backlighting there and – voila – that’s my girlfriend, everybody. "I’m hot," says Jess. "Is it just me or is anyone else hot?"

In the process, the show skewers every male-authored female character – sex kittens, manic pixie dreamgirls and all; every girlfriend that only ever speaks of her outfit and her other half. This flunks the Bechedel test with flying colours.

But Latowicki isn’t simply a sock puppet. She has some agency of her own, even, in all probability, a hand in the writing. How else could she describe Tim as the "creepy, note-taking sort," the kind of man who’s never taken a punch. She scripts us in turn – "say yes" – letting us decide whether or not to comply. And she dances too – erotically, aggressively, exhaustingly – but you can’t write a dance, can you? As she shakes her ass in its sequinned shorts, you’re never sure if that’s empowering or degrading. Disconcerting, certainly. She flicks a glare at Cowbury, then turns us a yeah-you-know-it smile.

In the end, the only people that know what’s what are the couple themselves. The relationship, as we see it, is one big performance – as every relationship is. They toy with the public/private distinction – sometimes a unified front, sometimes outing or undermining one another – so that we become a third wheel. They’re a single public unit made of two private individuals – and there’s the relationship’s frictious rub.

It’s not simply navel-gazing. There’s real politics in the personal – and Made In China suggest a sexism so deep-rooted that it’s even infected our most meaningful, loving relationships. Every patronising pat-on-the-head – Tim calls Jess’s silly mistakes ‘Jessisms’ – and every public shaming is, in its way, redolent of the 1950’s and its infantilised housewives. Never mind the pay gap or childcare allowance. Gender inequality starts at home – right where the heart is.

Tonight I'm Gonna Be The New Me runs at the Soho Theatre until 26th September.