The one-night stand is comedy’s gift that keeps on giving: a pressure cooker of intimacy, regret, hope and awkward logistics. David Ireland’s Most Favoured takes that familiar morning-after scenario and, then twists it into something weirder.
The short show premiered in Scotland in 2013 and was memorably billed a ‘theatrical snack’. Now Most Favoured get its London premiere at Soho Theatre, in a new production, but still clocking in at a brisk 45 minutes. Director Max Elton confines the production to set designer Ceci Calf’s nondescript, three-star-looking hotel room: a timber bed frame and rumpled sheets wrapped in a striped polyester bed-runner.
In this anonymous space, Mike (Alexander Arnold) drifts nonchalantly around the hotel room, while Mary (Lauren Lyle) is exhilarated. She reveals that she has, for the first time in her life, felt loved, and she is determined to make Mike understand the significance of that fact. He, however, has also experienced a first: he’s tried KFC, and is understandably fixated on the finger lickin’ goodness.
That bucket of chicken becomes the play’s central running joke and, eventually, its structural crutch. The awkwardness escalates when Mary reveals why she has been picking up men for at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (I mean, where else do people find ‘glamourous’ specimens — I mean, men — with good genes?)
The pair function as effective foils. Lyle gives Mary unfiltered, Glaswegian charm, shot through with moments of genuine, eye-watering vulnerability, while Arnold plays Mike as contentedly detached from ambition or urgency. Yet there’s a curious lack of chemistry between them, making much of the play’s emotional logic hard to fully invest in. Ireland, however, provides an explanation for this gap — he’s too canny a writer not to.
Directed by Soho Theatre’s associate director Elton, the production avoids unnecessary embellishment. The blocking is simple, the rhythm clean. That simplicity works, but it also exposes the play’s limitations. In Ireland’s script there are no external pressures, no thunderous escalations — just a series of conversational loops, incremental revelations (and chicken jokes), which begins to feel stretched.
In an era when writers mistake endurance for depth, there’s something quietly radical about a pre-dinner show. Short-form theatre allows little room for padding or exploration, and while Most Favoured doesn’t entirely overcome the limitations of its form, like a late-night snack, you’ll probably still be glad you had it.
