Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Rachel McKweon, James Wray, Gareth Cobham, Richard Carlin.

Break ups are never easy, they don’t actually even just entail the two people going through the process, family aside, it effects a wide circle of friends and close personal attachments to the point where some people breaking up demand that you take sides in a fit of ownership. Whilst others feel as though they have no choice but to make a complete break of the whole situation; to the point where starting with nothing is preferable to looks of disappointment and heartbreak.

For Aiden and Mark, breaking up is especially hard to do, too many memories, too many points of reference in which their lives have meant something in the past and after four years together the way ahead is not so clear.

Wes Williams’ Mates Rates is a distinct look at the way couples can live together and yet not be in sync, their lives almost bordering on the destructive as their separate thoughts tear them slowly apart and take them down the inevitable route. Not broken by someone callously coming between them, not wrecked by the jealousy of an interfering third person, but just through Time corroding away at the very soul of their relationship.

Directed by Anthony Proctor, Mates Rates is a heart warming and determined play that frames the two main points of relationships, the first being that it is nobody else’s business what goes on in your own home and the second that life is hard, even without mates trying to help. Ultimately, the only people who should talk it through are the two people involved, a lesson that we all learn at some point and perhaps some later than others.

For Gareth Cobham and Richard Carlin as Mark and Aiden, the beauty of their relationship shone through and whilst neither wanted to back down, neither could they stay apart, too much had not been said and too much lived for them to separate. For Wes Williams this play was written with so much feeling, so much soul seems to have gone into this particular production that it affirms life on many levels; something missed by many other writers across all the genre boards.

Mates Rates, in the end all relationships come down to two people, that’s all that truly matters.

Ian D. Hall