Aidan Turner and Jenna Coleman bring added zest to Lemons

Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons (which hereafter we’ll shorten to one Lemons for convenience) is currently in London’s West End but next month will transfer to Manchester Opera House for one week only.

Lemons was the first play written by Sam Steiner back in 2015 when he was just 21 and a student at Warwick University. It went on to enjoy three sold out runs at the Edinburgh fringe and has now been revived with an A-list pairing - Aidan Turner and Jenna Coleman.

The play explores the relationship of a couple at a time when a new ‘hush law’ has been introduced permitting individuals to only speak 140 words out loud each day.

Sam admits that the whole experience of seeing his first effort as a writer being brought back and going into the West End has been a surreal experience.

But as much as he has enjoyed the West End run you sense that it’s the fact that the production will get to come to Manchester - his home city - that appears to mean the most to him.

“I’m so excited about that,” he said. “It really means the world that it can be seen in the city where I fell in love with the theatre. All my mates who I grew up with can come and see it. That may sound like a simple thing but it means a huge amount to me.”

Since writing Lemons, Sam has become one of the country’s leading playwriting talents and he has relished the opportunity to revisit the work that effectively kick started his career.

“In some ways I am scratching a few itches that I had,” he said. “It has been a strange experience because I feel like quite a different person to who I was then. I wrote it when I was 21 and now I’ve just turned 30. The play has kind of bookended my 20s in a really surreal way.

“And obviously I’ve written more plays since then so I’ve been able to go back in to it and tighten a few nuts and bolts in the writing.

“Also Aidan and Jenna are a bit older than the actors we’d originally envisaged and I’m a bit older too. I suppose I’ve tried to mature it a little bit which has been really fascinating.”

But the basic premise remains. Lemons is a heartwarming, charming, funny and challenging study of a couple’s relationship further complicated by their inability to use more than 140 words a day.

Twitter users will be familiar with the problems this can cause but where did the original idea come from.

“To be honest I can’t actually remember,” said Sam. “I think Ed Madden (the play’s original director and fellow student) and I were probably in the pub having a chat.

“Yes, there was the thing with Twitter limiting the number of characters but it was more due to our own restrictions. We had no money, we were friends with two actors we really liked and wanted to put on a show with them with no resources and that became the theme for the play - making a virtue out of a lack of resources.”

Having hit upon the idea of the 140 word limit, Sam admits he hadn’t quite appreciated the problems that would cause him as the writer.

“It was a nightmare,” he laughed. “It really did my head in at first but you just have to be really creative with it.

“But it also helped to shape the play. Out of necessity scenes can’t be very long so it gives the play a natural fleet footedness which is both a virtue and a curse I guess.

“It’s a completely different way of writing and you have to effectively find your own language which has been really refreshing to go back to.

“Coming back after so many years to the play, I don’t remember what the original impulse was, there’s a lot been going on.

“So the only way for me to really get back into it was to listen to what the play was telling me. As a writer I’m not someone who can hold a plan in their head and follow it. But if I go over something I can come up with a little twist or find a better way to do it.”

Lemons could easily be seen as a commentary on a Big Brother society and given Covid and the enforced lockdowns might also be regarded as being particularly prescient. But Sam is not someone to impose his own thoughts on the work.

“It is up to the audience to interpret it really,” he said. “I’ve tried hard not to see too much contemporary relevance in the play although there is a political vagueness and moments that feel like they are about something,

“But this is a play which has this couple’s relationship at its heart and how they communicate with each other.”

The fact that Aidan and Jemma - musician Oliver and lawyer Bernadette - are playing the two characters has left Sam “feeling slightly giddy”.

Aidan will probably be best known for playing the lead in the BBC’s Poldark and more recently from ITV’s The Suspect. Jenna has gone from Doctor Who’s sidekick to the BBC mini-series The Serpent and The Sandman on Netflix.

Sam said: “They are phenomenal actors and I feel incredibly lucky and slightly giddy that they are doing it. When we did the first couple of read throughs with them I just smiled the whole time. They bring so much personality tenderness complexity to it. I think it’s going to be really special in their hands.”

Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Manchester Opera House, Tuesday, March 21 to Saturday, March 25. Details from www.atgtheatres.com