 Aftertaste is a sharp and fascinating Gen-Z exploration of dating, gender norms, and the quiet politics of intimacy. Following a recent breakup, Juniper is disillusioned with love and life and spends her evenings dragging first dates back to the chaos of her bedroom. But what begins as a pursuit of physical connection quickly becomes a wry dissection of modern romance, desire, and the rules of engagement that shape them.
Juniper’s mission is simple enough: to salvage something - contact, affirmation, distraction from even the most mediocre encounters. Yet her would-be partners resist, and in that resistance lies the heart of the play. The first date, a painfully awkward hook-up who refuses sex altogether, upending the cliché of male lust and immediate availability. The second, a disastrous blind date, is a man straining to be progressive in his language but lapsing into hollow tropes and borrowed feminist soundbites, revealing just how performative feminism can become in the dating economy. And then there is the third: a self-styled misogynist who takes the time to lecture Juniper on why she is “oppressed,” and where mansplaining shades into power play. Taken together, these encounters sketch a shifting landscape of gender and sexuality in the age of apps. Dating, once imagined as a game of attraction and spontaneity, here feels like a series of negotiations, each one shadowed by questions of who holds the power, who sets the terms, and whose narrative gets to dominate. The men are not just characters but embodiments of modern archetypes - the passive refuser, the faux ally, the reactionary traditionalist. These will be figures familiar to anyone scrolling Tinder or Hinge at 2am. What Aftertaste captures with a sharp eye is the way Gen-Z negotiates intimacy in a culture where the pursuit of connection is always mediated by performance: height listed in profiles, progressive credentials performed in conversation, gender norms argued over like debate topics. While we see Juniper ricochet between three men, the structure makes clear this is only a sample, a glimpse into a cycle that could repeat endlessly with five, ten, twenty variations of the same figures. The names and faces may change, but the dynamics remain uncannily familiar. It’s in that repetition that the play’s true sting emerges — the aftertaste of modern dating isn’t just bitter, it’s lingering, clinging to the tongue long after the night is over. Lee Hutchison Aftertaste Venue: Thistle Theatre at Greenside @ Riddles Court Dates: August 23rd Time: 1500 Tickets: www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/aftertaste |
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