Review: BLINK, King’s Head Theatre

When it premiered at Soho Theatre in 2012, Blink was a whimsical oddity that critics viewed as an ode to two eccentric loners falling in love. In 2026, though, Phil Porter’s play takes on a decidedly darker tone, with the subtitle “a parasocial love story” on marketing materials foreshadowing things to come.

Jonah (Joe Pitts) moves into an East London flat in the same building as Sophie (Abigail Thorn, of the Philosophy Tube YouTube channel), with whom he shares some odd similarities – both of them have recently come into an inheritance after losing a parent to pancreatic cancer. On an impulse, Sophie posts a baby monitor to him, and Jonah watching her from his flat eventually progresses to following her around in public, all without a single spoken interaction: exactly what we might now call a parasocial relationship.

Blink’s humour is deadpan and lightly absurdist, with lines like “as a child I developed an unlikely fascination with postboxes” shared self-deprecatingly with the audience, and Pitts and Thorn have the character acting chops to carry it. But there are moments where the humour cannot paper over the acute discomfort we feel at Jonah’s behaviour – for most of the show, he doesn’t know Sophie sent the monitor herself, so isn’t engaging in a fully consensual interaction.

Rather than avoiding it, Simon Paris’ new production leans into the discomfort. The back wall is plastered with hazy CCTV-style screens, giving us the sense that we’re both watching and being watched. We the audience and Jonah are both in the uncomfortable position of voyeur to someone who wants to be observed; once Jonah realises Sophie lives in the same building as him, Peter Small’s lighting is suddenly clinically bright, dragging us out of any kind of romantic reverie.

Phil Porter’s writing is less concerned with the ‘why’ – why Sophie posted the baby monitor, or why Jonah was so drawn to her – and more concerned with the ‘how’. Sophie and Jonah orbit around each other and the audience as they lay out their vulnerabilities, and it’s never clear exactly who they’re talking to or how intimately connected to them we ought to feel. Technology, and the ability to know someone’s life from afar, is at once uniting us and making us further apart than ever.

Blink has a rather soapy twist – involving a hallucination of a dead relative and a van of actors on their way to perform a road safety-themed school play – about two-thirds of the way through. It’s an audacious move for any play to go in this direction, and it causes this particular production to lose its footing slightly; the Panopticon-esque set design doesn’t work quite as well once the action transfers to a hospital room. Similarly, the awkward beginnings of Jonah and Sophie’s genuine romantic relationship in the play’s final scenes feel at odds with the sense of unease previously established.

What remains a consistent thread throughout, though, is the idea of human connection. Jonah and Sophie may be deeply flawed in how they approach their relationship, but through their unconventional methods something emerges that is vanishingly difficult to find in a city as isolating as London. Blink allows us to sit in the knowledge that both these things can be true.

Blink plays at the King's Head Theatre until 22 March