Review: In Shifters, Piecing Together a First Great Love

Calling all drama students! If you’re digging for scene study material, Benedict Lombe’s Shifters is the next dramatic gold mine. The two-person play, imported from the West End to A24’s Cherry Lane Theatre, is a love story told through its pivotal moments—if those moments were tossed in a raffle drum and plucked out one by one. There’s not enough time to admire the detailed craftwork in each passing vignette, but there’s no question that Shifters is a mosaic of meticulously cut and polished gems.

The play, at its core, is a relationship study. Des (Heather Agyepong reprising her Olivier-nominated performance) and Dre (Daniel Ezra) reunite at Dre’s grandmother’s funeral, and from there, jump around in time to fill in the blanks of their baggage-laden present dynamic. The slow doling of information, however, is just part of Shifters’ propulsion. Lombe’s interest in these two characters and the bond that connects them spans the miniscule to the existential.

Des (short for Destiny) and Dre meet as schoolmates and antagonistic debaters in South London. Des is British Congolese and the middle-class daughter of a neurologist. Dre, a Nigerian Brit, scrapes by in the small house he shares with his grandmother. Des hides her pain behind a wall of sarcasm. Dre hides his behind a perma-smile. Grief, class, family heritage, trauma, they all loom quietly large, shaping how Des and Dre move through the world, and more intriguingly, how they dance around each other. It’s an up-close look at the building blocks of a first love, debunking its mystery but validating its profundity.

Director Lynette Linton shapes the production at ground level, giving shade and dimension to every slight dynamic shift between her two excellent actors. Agyepong is impish and playful as Des tests just how much honesty she’d like to drop on this friend of hers. Ezra, meanwhile, performs more outright warmth and openness while keeping Dre’s most fragile parts behind protective glass.

Every scene, in a vacuum, is tight and clear. It’s the collective grab bag of moments—a graduation, a study session, a late-night spat—that can sometimes drag with a feeling of aimlessness. What keeps us invested in the minutiae of Des and Dre’s will-they-won’t-they wanderings is the cosmic picture that’s housing them all. The vaguely sci-fi enclosure of light that moves us from scene to scene (lighting by Neil Austin, sets by Alex Berry, sound by Tony Gayle) might conjure memories of Nick Payne’s popular two-hander Constellations, a love story that travels the multiverse.

Shifters is not jumping timelines, but it is asking whether the romantic idea of “soulmates”—the one Des and Dre’s youthful courtship is flashing with a neon sign—is just a nice story that we can rearrange and reinterpret at will. Des suspects as much, but is that just her cynicism talking? Dre believes in…Destiny…but is that just a symptom of his naivete? Lombe makes space for either alternative in this aerial view of intimacy. But don’t worry. Neither one makes a great love any less great.