Keeping Your Spots
★★
An infidelity hotline offering advice to people contemplating cheating on their partners sounds like a promising premise for a dark comedy. Unfortunately, Joshua J. Jewkes's Keeping Your Spots never quite delivers on that potential, despite a committed performance from its writer and sole onstage actor.
Jewkes plays Jared, the enthusiastic acting supervisor of Harper's Infidelity Hotline, who invites the audience to become his colleagues as he demonstrates the finer points of dealing with callers considering an affair. The opening is engaging enough, with an intriguing suggestion that the company operates almost like an exclusive membership service for prospective adulterers. However, what initially promises to be a rather deliciously immoral business concept gradually becomes something resembling a relationship advice helpline, leaving the premise feeling increasingly muddled.
The writing is the production's principal weakness. Rather than developing a convincing narrative, the play relies heavily on a succession of telephone conversations and observations about relationships, many of which feel laboured or predictable. There is little sense of dramatic progression, and when the story eventually turns towards Jared's own circumstances, the revelations are hardly surprising.
The pre-recorded callers present another difficulty. Their delivery frequently feels overly rehearsed, while the voices themselves lack sufficient variety in accent, background or character. The result is a succession of rather uniformly middle-class sounding callers, diminishing the sense that Jared is dealing with a genuinely diverse cross-section of people and their complicated relationships.
To his credit, Jewkes throws himself into the performance with considerable enthusiasm. He has an engaging stage presence and there are moments when his comic timing produces genuine laughter. Unfortunately, these are interspersed with jokes and situations that feel increasingly contrived, occasionally becoming more uncomfortable than amusing.
There is undoubtedly the germ of a good idea here, and Jewkes deserves credit for tackling a potentially provocative subject through a one-man format. But enthusiasm alone cannot compensate for underdeveloped writing, an uncertain premise and a narrative that never really takes flight.
Keeping Your Spots has its moments, but ultimately proves a disappointing evening that promises considerably more than it delivers.
Keeping Your Spots was performed at the Hen & Chickens Theatre, Islington, London (N1 2NA) from 4 to 8 October 2026
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