There are many people for which capital L love remains elusive. It is a mysterious question that life poses, an elusive moment of clarity sought among the fog, a slippery fish escaping inexperienced hands.

The pursuit of love is often dismissed as frivolous, yet each connection carries the potential to change us, move us, dismantle what we think we know about life and reassemble it anew. Somehow, all of this unfolds within the mundanity of daily life: in the wine we drink; the food we prepare; the trips we take, and the memories we dare to confide.

Jez Butterworth’s The River entwines the mysteries of love, truth and memory with the ordinary stuff of life and the quiet profundity of nature. Like his other award-winning plays Jerusalem and The Ferryman, The River unfolds in a rural setting – in this case, in a secluded cabin by an unnamed river.

Designer Anna Tregloan employs dark, hanging drapes to evoke a dense forest backdrop that intimates remoteness and obscurity. At the centre sits the skeletal scaffold of a house, where we meet The Man (Ewen Leslie,...