Blackout Songs: Sympathy, Misplaced

Do we really need another play where a mediocre man dodges responsibility, drifts on impulse until consequences hit, then grabs the nearest woman like a life raft and calls it love, when it’s really just convenience?
(Please note: there will be spoilers.)

That’s the question that kept looping through my mind while watching Blackout Songs by Joe White, now in its U.S. premiere starring Owen Teague and Abbey Lee, directed by Rory McGregor. Framed as an intimate two-person memory play about addiction, the concept—more than the writing—feels like the hook: time jumps, repeated moments, missing hours, scenes replayed with new shading. The gaps are the point—blackouts as structure, shame as an unreliable narrator.

Maybe my frustration was sharpened by over-researching the show before it arrived stateside. This production came with a reputation: sold-out runs at London’s Hampstead Theatre and an Olivier nomination. The premise is clean and combustible. Two people meet at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and almost immediately bolt for a pub, kicking off a decade-long loop of ecstasy, relapse, and “recovery,” with both the audience and the characters forced to assemble what’s real from what’s been lost to the bottle. Critics have largely praised the intimacy and craft—the way the piece coils and uncoils in the room—even while some admit it doesn’t entirely land.

And here’s the annoying part: it is well done. The acting is excellent—precise, grounded, and fearless. The direction is so controlled that thin writing can almost read as a choice. The design team pulls off something genuinely difficult: keeping a fractured timeline legible without sanding down the chaos that makes it a memory play in the first place. Even reviewers lukewarm on the script concede that it plays powerfully live.

But the writing didn’t land—not because it’s “not for me,” but because it’s the same old story, and it doesn’t earn the time it asks for. It replays a well-worn dynamic and calls it depth because the subject matter is taboo. Yes, you could argue the play is self-aware—that it’s showing how addiction warps memory, how love becomes narrative, how both people rewrite the past to survive. I get that. My problem is that the show still funnels our sympathy in the most familiar direction.

Charlie, the feckless lead, makes the same choices over and over, and the script insists on treating that repetition as a tragic arc rather than a refusal to act. He gets “serious” only when consequences arrive—when his college threatens to kick him out. He then turns recovery into appetite. He latches onto Alice—the other half of this two-person play, who can’t even reliably remember their first encounter—and uses her as a blank canvas for his needs. He pours his chaos into her as if she were a vessel built to hold him, then blames her when she can’t carry it, even as she’s drowning too.

Honestly, I would’ve been open to a version of this that fully committed to the delusions of his addiction—the way he frames himself as a winner, a better artist, a deeper human, while the reality is that he’s broke, incoherent, and unsafe when he drinks. That could be incisive. But the show doesn’t hold that line. It swerves into moral cleanup and hands him a halo anyway—because the ending asks us to land on her confession: she loved him, she didn’t say it, and now she has to live with it.

That’s where the larger offense clicks into place. This play doesn’t just demand that she carry him in life—it’s written so she can’t even carry herself on the page. Alice is rendered as a manic pixie dream girl with a built-in eraser. Early on, we’re told she can’t remember when she drinks, so the play gives itself permission not to build her. It gestures at depth—father stuff, grief, a past—then drops it. Her pain surfaces; the scene pivots back to him. She becomes the perfect blank slate for male projection: sexy, charming, available, and structurally unable to hold him accountable. As usable as the girl in the centerfold. As deep as the ink she’s printed in.

Even when he “improves,” the dynamic doesn’t evolve. At one point he claims a new life—sober, stable, with someone who’s only known him that way—and still, the gravity of the play bends back toward the old loop. They relapse, he dies, she blames herself, and we’re left with the same empty question: who was she when she wasn’t servicing his storyline? She holds down work and a home while her memory keeps collapsing in on itself, but the script shows no curiosity about her survival. It’s too busy making her useful.

What makes it sting is that the play accidentally gives us a far more interesting character—and then refuses to invest in her. Semi-stable, she holds down a job, an apartment, and even buys the drinks while her memory collapses and addiction keeps pulling her under. She is doing the hard, unglamorous work of surviving, and the script gives her nothing in return. No reprieve. No sympathy. No growth. No understanding. No arc. She exists as his emotional landfill—a void he screams into and occasionally fucks. And in the end, her only role is to feel guilty that she’s still alive, while the “martyr” who hollowed her out is gone.

Worse still, the play refuses to name the cycle for what it is. It never allows anyone to say, plainly, that this kind of consuming, exploitative attachment—this I need you so I can function version of love—is part of addiction too. Not romantic. Not poetic. Not tragic in the way the play wants it to be. Just another form of harm. But that reckoning never arrives, because it doesn’t matter. Because she doesn’t matter.

So we end where so many stories insist we end: with a woman alone, blaming herself for not offering the correct final dose of tenderness to a man determined to destroy himself. As if love were an intervention. As if her body and care were ever meant to be his treatment plan. As if the person worth mourning were the one who floated through, took what he needed, and left devastation behind—while the one who carried addiction and responsibility is treated like set dressing.

That’s not a hard story.
That’s a familiar one.
And it’s exhausting.