Love Bird

Love Bird is ridiculous – or ‘absurd’ as director Phoebe Taylor’s program note has it – but it is great fun, funny and underneath its nonsense it has something to say about ‘love’ in several manifestations.  A talented cast commit to the absurdity and – as when farce works best – play it straight.

Little Franny (Jessica Martin) gets a cockatiel for her eighth birthday.  Dad’s hearty mate Bill (Brendan McFarlane) in safari suit, delivers the bird and gives an expert’s spiel about its habits.  Franny already has loads of toys, but she’s thrilled to bits: now she has someone to love and someone to love her back.  She names the bird Ping Pong (it morphs from a doll to become Ryan Stewart – as a preening, squawking, bad-tempered, ever-horny bird).  Franny bills and coos over him.  The problem is that Ping loves her back rather too over-enthusiastically, leaving Franny with ‘dirty’ hands and shocking her parents, Joan (Phoebe Taylor) and Richard (Matt Tester), who have a thing about ‘cleanliness’.  They also have a thing about sex: Joan feigning distaste and Richard eager for more… 

Ms Taylor, as director, not only sets a cracking pace that never flags, as performer her Joan convincingly dominates Mr Tester’s Richard.  Mr Tester milks the fact that no matter what happens, Richard is the same: buttoned up in suit and tie, anxious, fearful, up-tight and mumbling in a monotone.  (Mr Tester might take the monotone mumbling too far: at times, he’s hard to understand.)

But back to Ping.  Franny learns that cockatiels mate for life – so, of course, Franny and Ping marry.  But that doesn’t solve the problem.  Bill brings another cockatiel around.  Problem solved?  No, the new bird (also hilariously played by Mr McFarlane - a big man in a silver plumage jump suit) turns out to be a male.  He and Ping fight and then… Horrors!  Is Ping gay?  Or just a polymorphous pervert?

Time passes.  Little Franny grows up.  Played by natural comedienne Jessica Martin, with her sweet baby face, the switch from childhood ‘innocence’ to adolescent selfishness is close to scary.  When a saggy jeans doofus boyfriend enters the picture (Mr McFarlane yet again), Ping goes into a frenzy…

You get the idea.  At around seventy-five minutes, Love Bird could do with a trim, but the energy and controlled craziness of the writing – and not crazy for crazy’s sake – just about carries the audience along to the ironic and yes, bitter end.

Michael Brindley

Image by Jaklene Vukasinovic