In Crocodile Tears at the Burton Taylor, heartbreak gets stuck in the replay loop. Love is not a feeling. It’s a file format. Natascha Norton’s Crocodile Tears unfolds like a post-breakup psychosis through screens, voiceovers, fractured dialogue, and digital detritus. It might look like this if Freud had been forced to write Scenes from a Marriage using Final Cut Pro.

The premise is simple: two people fall apart. But this is no neat morality tale of heartbreak. It doesn’t ask who was right or wrong, but rather something far murkier. What happens when someone you’ve loved becomes part of your perceptual software? When forgetting them would mean deleting part of yourself?

Elektra Voulgari Cleare leads a taut two-person ensemble, but this is no linear trajectory. She performs with remarkable control, sharp, bruised, and uncanny in her detachment. It’s like watching someone narrate their breakdown in real time while simultaneously editing the footage. She isn’t interested in being liked. She’s interested in being seen, even if it makes you squirm. Her co-star, Flynn Ivo, offers a quieter counterbalance, a felt presence, more ghost than partner, refracted through the logic of projection and absence.

The show is steeped in surveillance, not the CCTV kind, but the psychic kind: emotional playback, internalised spectatorship, and self-monitoring. Characters watch themselves on screens. Text appears before it’s spoken. The inner monologue has been outsourced to an external processor. Language arrives late, wrong, or not at all. Not just memory but selfhood itself is fragmented.

Some scenes teeter between psychodrama and farce. A passive-aggressive “Can I kiss you?” drips with existential dread. A banal line about a late period becomes a moment about shame, time, and the impossibility of narrative closure. One character is accused of being “crazy” while scrolling silently, a scene that feels too real yet chillingly rehearsed. In Crocodile Tears, even gaslighting is a genre.

The production is visually minimal but emotionally loaded. Multimedia elements are not just decorative, but structural. Projections don’t clarify; they haunt, as if the play is being stalked by its subtext. The aesthetic is sparse but meticulous: black-box intimacy meets digital intrusion. The ghosts here don’t wear sheets; they’re rendered in 1080p.

Crocodile Tears is a cinematic fever dream of heartbreak and rebirth, of both film and theatre. Italian summers bleed into fractured memories. Raw dialogue collides with surreal projection, haunting soundscapes, and Virginia Woolf-style lyricism. For film lovers and romantics who ache for bittersweetness, this multimedia experience captures the slow unravelling of intimacy and the intoxicating pull of nostalgia. Melancholy never felt so good.

Norton’s play resists catharsis. There’s no closure, no resolve, just glitch and repeat. A scene ends in silence. A character walks off-screen. It doesn’t feel dramatic; it feels like a browser tab you forgot to close. Dialogue flits from Bukowskiesque, “Your coffee didn’t taste any good,” to Lacan-on-Twitter, “You’re just obsessed with being seen.” These aren’t lovers. They’re unreliable narrators of each other’s trauma.

The real heartbreak here isn’t being deserted. It’s being remembered incorrectly.