It is not that scenography is no good, it’s perfectly fine. It is not that the acting is mediocre, it’s nothing special but absolutely fit for purpose. It is just that the play itself is very, very bad. The QR code at the bar should have been a warning sign: scan at your peril as the trigger warning contains spoilers. But once the tickets and wine are bought, you are fully committed, and it is too late to run.

And run we should have. Because whilst the first 40 or so minutes of the play are well written, witty, fast paced and simply funny, the rest of the play is a different kettle of fish altogether. It goes from being a light-hearted comedy to an attempt at deep and meaningful. In of its own, this drastic change of tack is not a problem. The problem however is that it makes the entire narrative make no sense what so ever, especially in the context of those earlier 40 minutes.

So now my trigger warning / spoiler alert. Stop reading here as in order to demonstrate how the plot simply does not hold water, I cannot but give away some of the plot’s detail.

It turns out that the Spanish guy, who picked up a drunk American woman at a hen-do in a tapas bar, was, in fact, intent on committing suicide by wrecking ball the following morning. He seems very intent on the sex but has no plan for how to kick the female out of the apartment ahead of the demolition of the building commencing. Turns out this Spanish guy, who does not seem to have a single grey hair, had a university aged daughter who died in the 2004 Madrid train bombings, five years earlier – this is in fact her apartment. And when the 35-year-old bride-to-be puts on the daughter’s dress, suddenly she becomes the embodiment of that 20-something year-old girl. A moment before, regardless of her state of intoxication, the Spanish guy was intent on shagging her.

If all of this was not already enough to make the writing come across as completely incredulous, this is the same Spanish guy who describes the disintegration of his marriage (following the aforementioned tragic death of his daughter) as his wife’s nails clawing at his bones and heart. Rather than a mother unable to forgive her husband for his decision not to drive their daughter that fateful day, the playwright makes the wife sound like a harridan…It becomes very difficult to sympathise with this incestuous man who is devoid of any empathy for his grieving wife.

The thing is, a play does not only go forward. The audience will reflect back every new piece of information provided onto what had come before. If it does not stack up, if it makes the earlier narrative ring false, that inconsistency will keep tugging at the viewer, distracting, and making everything that unfolds subsequently on stage come across untrue.

So, by the end, I lost any interest in the characters as it felt like my investment in their stories was not just misplaced but in fact misguided. In the final scene, where the ditsy American, encourages the Spanish guy towards the entrance door and away from the wrecking ball suicide, I just felt like laughing. Probably because I knew the cringe was about to end and I could finally head back home.