REVIEW: Blink at King's Head Theatre until 22 March 2026

"A strange and unique love story" ★★★★ ½   

The many mysteries of love are explored in a strange and unique love story playing down at the King's Head. In a curiously still-current revival of Phil Porter's Blink. Two lonely Londoners, whose mirror lives of grief, peculiarity, and the mundane, collide in a banal but beautiful twist of fate when they become accidental neighbours.

Battling through grief for her father and searching for meaning in her toneless life, Sophie (Abigail Thorn) anonymously mails her new downstairs neighbour, Jonah (Joe Pitts), an old baby monitor, on which he can peek into her life upstairs. Suddenly she finds that allowing herself to be watched gives value and significance to ordinary activities like eating, reading, watching TV. And, too, for Jonah, the act of watching gives substance to his otherwise empty and confused existence. It’s the perfect match. A beguiling meet-cute for the modern age. And in a two-hander, that perfect match hinges on how well the leads connect with us and with each other. This, they achieve with rare magnificence.

Abigail Thorn as Sophie and Joe Pitts as Jonah not only have great chemistry, but they are also both magnetic to watch individually. Simon Paris’s direction here has something to say for their casual and assured fourth-wall-fading interaction with the audience, in which their conversation seems to blend and merge and absorb into the crowd. I have seen this done effectively only once or twice before, and rarely with such aplomb. It adds a relevance to the story by layering on a tone of lovers endearingly recounting to friends the story of how they met, giving lightness to what is essentially a tale of voyeurism and stalking, a timely comment on what it means to be seen.

It helps that Porter’s writing is nigh on faultless in my view, nuanced, with rarely a bum note, and enough headroom to allow the actors and director a bit of freedom for inhabitation. In its one-act structure, it is elegantly constructed and engaging to the last moment, revealing and concealing exactly what it needs to, exactly when it should, though I’d say the pacing drops in the final quarter or so, with the dénouement, satisfying as it is, then coming quite abruptly.

All this though is just a bonus, as it’s almost worth the ticket price alone for the overall production design. Peter Small on lights, Sam Glossop on sound, Matt Powell on the video, and Emily Bestow on design have delivered a snappy, stylish, and skilful stage. The slick and sparing use of some powerfully minimal effects – a pulsing light strip representing an ECG, a giant hospital curtain falling from the ceiling, a series of hauntingly evocative images on fragmented screens, the genius set of transparent furniture and blank props – all these give space and respect to the words being spoken, while at the same time commenting on them, enhancing them. This is an example of all the elements of theatre working in harmony.

Blink is in its way deliriously romantic, while odd and somehow profound. While not exactly like them, it teeters into the offbeat territory of some other brilliantly bizarre and beguiling takes on the romcom genre: I’m thinking Pillion (2025) – or better still, its book form, Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones; or the former King's Head alumnus, Puppy (2025).

And it is indeed the kind of quality only the King's Head can offer. And like that aforementioned show, this is very close to a five-star piece, but its overall vision, for me, gets clunky towards the end: a dip in pace, a sudden resolve; it's haunting but loses its point and potency. I wanted a bit more, more human ambiguity, more bittersweetness. But please bear in mind though that this is in the context of a fantastic production. I still loved it. And it just goes to show that love comes in many forms: this one is about seeing and being seen. And it definitely should be.

Blink by Phil Porter

Directed by Simon Paris

Produced by Metal Rabbit Productions

King’s Head Theatre, 24 February – 22 March 2026

Box Office: https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/blink-df19 

Photos by Charlie Flint

Reviewed by Alix Owen