Jab by James McDermott, Finborough Theatre, 24 February 2024

There’s something gloriously quaint about the Finborough Theatre. Even by the standards of pub theatres, it seems gloriously wedded to the past.

In part, that’s because The Finborough is, at least at present, a few rooms above a corner building that used to be a pub, rather than an actual functioning pub.

But also, it is the sort of place that clings to its roots, even in the matter of archaic ticketing practices. These days we receive, when booking The Finborough, a very modern style e-mail ticketing with a QR code for each e-ticket. On arrival at The Finborough, though, the ticket office still asks for your name and digs out the old-style paper tickets, just like the old days.

Don’t you have a gadget that goes beep and reads our e-tickets?

I asked the nice young woman on the desk.

Do we look like the sort of place that has a gadget that goes beep to read tickets?

She asked in repsonse.

Not really. Except that you did send us -tickets with QR codes on them.

I persisted.

We have no idea why they do that.

The nice young woman thus closed that discussion.

Anyway…

…the reason we go to the Finborough is not to admire the ticketing system. We tend to see consistently good small-scale theatre there.

Jab was no exception. A very good two-hander set during the Covid-19 pandemic, about a marriage that disintegrates during the crisis…although you sense that the marriage had been doing a fair bit of disintegrating prior to the pandemic.

Here is a link to the Finborough Theatre production stub for this show.

Very well acted and directed. Kacey Ainsworth, Liam Tobin & Scott Le Crass take a bow…well, the first two named actually did.

Just 80 minutes long, if you like your shows two hours plus this type of play is not for you. Janie and I have really acquired the taste for shorter plays. Never mind the young folk having short attention spans, we older folk have short buttocks-stuck-in-one-small-space spans these days.

Lots of good reviews for this one and deservedly so. Here is a link to a search that should find many such reviews.

We went home thoroughly satisfied, theatre-wise. After collecting and then, once home, eating our Mohsen dinner, our appetites for food were also thoroughly satisfied.