THEATRE

Presented by ACPC

The Hidden Bar

Review by James Burnside

Tinder Hearts is about a married couple experimenting with spouse-swapping parties organised via the popular dating app Tinder. To many, the idea of swapping spouses for fleeting sexual passion is at best risky and at worst a hurtful proposition. That’s the moral conundrum holding this play together.

While the husband, played by Goran Ozanic, is very much invested in swinging — mostly for the consequence free sex with other women — the wife, played by Vagna Fisher, who also wrote the play, is somewhat terrified and apprehensive, and complies simply to please her man and keep the marriage together. Tensions erupt and spiral out of control as an ensemble of wacky characters enters the scenario. Eventually (and inevitably) things take a turn for the worst.

Unfortunately, while the play does carry a strong, if somewhat meanspirited, message and a good lineup of entertaining performers, it also suffers from a slow pace and tonal inconsistencies. Subsequently, Tinder Hearts makes for a mixed bag of funny, slow and saddening moments that never quite live up to the potential of the premise.

The cast is competent, playing absurd caricatures with just enough depth and humanity to keep it from feeling like you’re watching Family Guy. There’s one questionable scene involving a trans woman who the cast keep referring to as ‘him’ which felt bizarrely regressive and mean spirited, but not enough to hurt the play as a whole.

While perhaps more could have been done to poke fun at the Tinder app itself, its inclusion still helped to give the show a satirical angle on ‘Tinder culture’, in which people are rated, valued and treated like commodities by strangers. It never feels judgemental about the swinger lifestyle, but it also seems to lament the loss of stable monogamy, and for the most part finds a good balance between the two elements.

What hurts Tinder Hearts is its pacing and the tone. At its core, it’s a story about love and betrayal. The wife feels hurt by her husband’s willingness to push her aside, and he’s blinded to that hurt by immature fantasies. Ironically, the subject matter feels too dark for the light comedy angle, and the play can’t decide if it’s just a raunchy laugh fest or an introspective critique, and it drops the ball from time to time. It isn’t helped by its pacing. Some scenes can drag on without much happening, while more interesting scenes are rushed and end abruptly.

Ultimately, Tinder Hearts is an amusing little romp that carries a moralistic message about the risks involved in trying to strengthen a marriage through ‘experimental’ means: worth a watch if you like raunchy comedy, but don’t expect to be blown away. I give this one a tentative swipe right.