Camden Fringe Review: Bathroom, Etcetera Theatre ★★★½

Bathroom: Two Lovers, One SHOWER, SlowLY Drowning IN A NEW LANGUAGE and culture

Bathroom asks us to lean in: voyeurs, peering straight into someone’s most intimate space, the room we all go to escape the world. For those who do, it offers an intimate demonstration of what moving between countries actually does to two people. There are the small puzzles no class prepares you for: what counts as ordinary small talk somewhere new, whether you’re somehow entitled to support the local football team once you’ve settled. And then there are the bigger questions. If racism exists (and we know it does), how do we notice when the issue really is racism, and when it’s something else entirely: talent, a personality clash, a difference of working styles?

Bathroom follows two young arrivals from Shenzhen (Jinyu Dan and Bowen Sun) sharing a cramped flat in London, written and directed by Yijing Zou for Limpid Theatre. Zou wrote an earlier version in 2024, before she herself moved to London with her partner; this rewrite, as she told me in an interview for Red Bus, is really about how a couple navigates changes from the outside world together, and how those changes end up changing them. The argument at the centre of the play spirals out from small domestic frictions into something much larger about identity and belonging, contained almost entirely within the flat’s one shared bathroom.

The chemistry between Dan and Sun is convincing. Even as they tear into each other, the love between them stays visible, and that matters: without it the ending would carry no weight at all.

There’s a quietly devastating moment where, as Shiming tries to explain how he’s feeling, Siwen simply carries on drying her hair, the noise of the dryer drowning him out as thoroughly as her turned back shuts him out. It’s the kind of small, unspoken cruelty that never announces itself as one: she isn’t refusing to listen, she’s just getting on with an ordinary task, and that’s precisely what makes it land. The play is full of these moments, intimacy withheld through the mundane rather than the dramatic.

Structurally the play can feel circular, and the pace is slower to start than it needs to be. But the second half, once the argument finally breaks, moves at a proper clip, and the circling makes its own sense. Zou has spoken of the couple as two whirlpools that can only merge if their direction and speed meet very exact conditions, and what we watch, round and round, is those conditions failing again and again, in slightly different ways. This is how real arguments between people who love each other often go, round and round, spiralling downward towards understanding rather than moving forward in a straight line.

The video and projection work is essential here. A distorted image and voice of a homeless figure appears at one point and lands well. An insistent phone beep and half-read, repeated text messages from a kind male colleague do a lot of storytelling without a word of dialogue. A burst of London traffic and tube announcements drops you straight into the city outside. And in the shower scene, English words build and blur as the water runs, a simple, effective way of putting the audience inside Siwen’s feeling of drowning in a language and culture not her own.

The play is performed in Mandarin with English surtitles. Unfortunately, the placement of the English surtitles, sitting above the stage on the opposite side to where much of the action was happening, meant my eyes had to keep flicking between the two rather than settling on either. It would also be helpful if the surtitles could differentiate who is speaking (perhaps with one character’s speech shown in italics). As the pace of the fight speeds up, it is also hard to read quickly enough.

One small addition to this: Shiming’s address to Siwen was often surtitled as “Miss Yao.” Having some grounding in Japanese, where honorifics like -san or -chan carry real information about closeness and shifting formality, I assume this is similar in Mandarin, and that Mandarin speakers in the audience will have caught those nuances. Unfortunately, “Miss Yao” in English sounds like the language heard at a bank counter or in the classroom, not between lovers, and it introduced a formality that worked against the intimacy on stage. Surtitles sometimes need to translate the intent rather than the literal translation, and her first name throughout, dropping the honorific altogether, may have served the English-speaking audience better. (I would leave the address as spoken on stage; this is a note on the English surtitles only, not the Mandarin dialogue).

For anyone interested in the migrant experience, this is an intimate inside look at what it takes to make London a home, when language and race get in the way, and at the difficulty of staying united as a couple while you try. As someone who moved to London as part of a couple myself, albeit without a language barrier to contend with, the sense of navigating a new culture and new experiences together rang true.