Cast of Characters

DAVE, 51 – single, a well-off London investment banker. Former partner of Amy

AMY, 40 – married, secondary school teacher. Former partner of Dave

The whole play takes place in Dave’s London apartment. Time: the present. The play runs without intermission.

Two chairs and a table with an open bottle of wine and two glasses. There is another small table, on which there is a bonsai tree. Underneath is a small watering-can. Both Dave and Amy have mobile phones. At rise, piano music by Erik Satie is playing – Les Gnossiennes No 1 – and then fades as action begins.

ave is nervous and humming to himself. He looks dishevelled and appears slightly groggy. He looks at his watch anxiously. He uses the can to water the bonsai tree and swivels it round to make it look its best. He inspects the wine glasses and holds them up to the light, checking there are no smears. He reads the label on the bottle of white wine and pats it tenderly. He sits in the armchair and scrolls through his mobile. He holds it to his ear, then speaks into it. He contacts a woman with whom he is in touch online and tells her he has sent her more money. She has been silent for a while so he wants to hear from her.

There’s a knock on the door and Amy arrives. They meet awkwardly because – as ex-partners – they haven’t seen each other for five years. They share the bottle of wine. Smalltalk ensues. Amy, still a teacher, is now married to Gary. Dave fills her in about his job. She notices the bonsai tree and asks him about it. She wanders around the flat.

They share more moments from their past together and begin to warm to each other. We learn that they split up because Amy wanted kids but Dave didn’t. And he always had his eye on other women. Amy hints at a deeper side of Dave beyond the City banker, a side that she always knew about but he seldom let out.

Then she reveals that she has been trying to have a child with Gary but has been unable to conceive. Following the doctor’s recommendation, they are undergoing IVF – but without success. Now Gary has lost interest in sex and she suspects he is having an affair. She is drinking and eating too much; her life is a mess.

Dave gets angry, asking what all this has to do with him. They argue and she gets up to leave. He persuades her to stay and she calms down. She tells Dave she’s become a bad teacher and is losing her friends. She says the reason she contacted him was because she needed to share her sadness with someone who doesn’t want to have children either – Dave. Now, with this apparent failure to conceive, she points out that they could have stayed together all along. She wants to update him.

Amy describes her jealousy over her friend Maya getting pregnant. Then she explains the challenges of IVF in graphic detail. Dave acknowledges that IVF is extremely expensive. People are asking when she’s going to have a baby and her parents are asking when she’s going to give them a grandchild. Dave tells her he gets the same questions.

Amy exits to use the lavatory.

Dave tries to contact his mystery girl-friend by phone but he can’t get through and there is no message. This annoys him and he goes to water the bonsai but holds back. They order a pizza and open another bottle of wine.

Dave suspects that Gary has lied about going to the conference. Amy’s phone rings and she thinks it is Gary keeping in touch but it’s the hospital with the results of the fourth round of IVF; the results are negative. She howls and breaks down. He urges her to accept it. She cries that she will soon be one of the 20 per cent of women over 42 who are childless. Dave then encourages her to believe that the next time will be successful.

She attacks him for his privileged upbringing and says all he cares about is making money and getting everything he wants. She says one text has mapped out the rest of her life. He shocks her by revealing that he would now like to be a father. He tells her how he recently finished a relationship with a girlfriend because she didn’t want to have any children. Men get broody, too, he says.

Amy is shocked but hurt that there has been this ironical twist in their relationship. In a monologue he tells her of a real episode which painfully brought it home to him how much he wanted to be a father. The message is: men feel the pain of not becoming parents, too.

Dave confesses that he now has a younger, digital girlfriend in another country with whom he hopes he can achieve his dream. Amy scorns this venture, accusing him of exploitation. Dave talks about how rare it is for men over 50 to become fathers. Amy tells him of the online fertility forum she has joined where the women display a fundamental zeal about giving birth. She concedes that she has huge respect for Dave for being so emotionally honest. She talks of the hope that she still harbours that one day she will conceive. Amy exits to buy another bottle of wine from the corner shop.

Dave receives bad news from his girlfriend. In anger, he swipes at the bonsai tree which crashes to the floor. Amy arrives back with a bottle. She wonders what has happened to the bonsai. Dave refuses to say at first. Together they clear up the mess. Eventually he lets on that his ‘doll’ has called the whole thing off and is marrying a boy in her village. Dave knows now that he’ll never be the father he longed to be. He tells Amy that he has given the woman and her family thousands of pounds. He’s been taken for a ride. She says he’s been an idiot.

She tells Dave that Gary has texted her and now wants a divorce. They have run out of money. She looks at her own body and regrets how useless her reproductive organs are. She reflects on how easily some women have babies and others, like her, are haunted by years of regret. She howls her rage.

It dawns on Dave that the whole online experience has been a scam and that his doll was part of a gang out to catfish him. He and Amy clash about the way Western men exploit vulnerable, poor foreign women. She says he deserves it because of the way he has behaved so irresponsibly over the years. Besides, she says, her suffering – and those of women – over being childless is worse than his.

Dave wonders if the doctors have made a mistake. He asks Amy if she would like to go to bed with him and make love. They are both desperate to have a baby. Why don’t they try? She is flattered but refuses.

Amy checks whether Dave really has given up trying to become a father or not. When he says he has, she asks him whether he would consider giving her the money to pay for one more round of IVF with Gary. He is shocked but says he can’t because he has none left – he has been completely cleared out. He gave away not thousands of pounds, but hundreds of thousands. Slowly, it dawns on Dave that all along Amy’s real reason for getting back in touch has been to persuade Dave to fund another round of IVF.

Dave tells her he has no energy left to get angry with her. They embrace. Together, they share their grief and pain. Why, when it is so easy for others, have they failed to have children? Who will look after them when they’re old? What will their legacy be? They perform a satirical song and dance routine mocking the cliches of advice that parents dish out to the childless. Then they exchange thoughts and regrets about how the rest of their lives will be haunted by an absence. The Erik Satie music starts to play.

Dawn breaks and Dave points that there lies the future. What does it look like, asks Amy. Hard to tell, he says. Together they water the bonsai tree.