About the play

Jane, a forty-two-year-old investment banker, is married to Jonathan, six years younger and a political theorist who’s been financially dependent on his wife for years. Jane also has a sister Cathy, a journalist who’s married to Musa, an unemployed Chechen poet, with twin baby daughters, all of whom are also financially dependent on Jane. On her forty-second birthday, Jane announces she wants to retire to have a baby of her own, much to Jonathan’s surprise and horror. When a suspected pregnancy turns out to be early menopause, Jane slides into a terrible depression. Meanwhile, Musa is trying to raise money to buy his brother’s liberation from a Russian detention center, and Jonathan finds himself embroiled in his first affair. Suspenseful, this five-hander begins as a comedy and then twists into a dark epic.

‘Tobsha Learner’s play Fidelity is rather like the playwright herself: initially and on the surface, it’s rather beautiful and acerbically funny; just below that charm, however, is another world – of ideas, sudden twists and turns, uncompromising explorations of human relations and even quite shockingly violent and tragically sad conclusions. It makes Fidelity an exceptionally powerful experience, both thought-provoking and memorable.’ – The Sunday Telegraph