Addiction is the third wheel in many a stage relationship. Plays such as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), J.P. Miller’s Days of Wine and Roses (1958), and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) examine the ways in which addiction – whether to alcohol, morphine, or even love – offers a heady sense of ‘something’ where once there seemed to be nothing at all.

The image of addiction as a song that fills an empty and deadening silence, but that becomes, inevitably, a siren’s call, is implicit in English writer Joe White’s Blackout Songs, a play whose structure hazily reflects that of a song cycle, and whose focus is a couple – Her and Him – who circle in and out of addiction, in and out of love.