Love, Love, Love

Love, Love, Love
By Mike Bartlett. Directed by Denny Lawrence. Red Stitch Actors Ensemble, St Kilda. 2nd June – 4th July, 2015

If you take a good (but not great) play by a young contemporary playwright, and combine it with a good (and often great) ensemble of  actors, plus an experienced director like Denny Lawrence, the audience is assured of, at the very least, a night of entertaining and challenging theatre.

Mike Bartlett’s play is an indictment of the Baby- Boomer generation, those full of weed induced ideology who thought they were going to change the world and ended up as slaves to the Capitalist society, before inflicting a far worse fate of un-motivated entitlement upon their children. The play is in three acts and three time periods …1967, 1990 and 2011… and it crackles along with great one-liners, some dagger-like observations on selfishness and the inevitable damnation of dysfunctional familes. On a superficial level I enjoyed it immensely. The problem is, it’s not real – and if you base a play on something that purports to have veracity and gravitas, and it doesn’t, that makes it doubly difficult for the director and the actors to convince. Bartlett’s sixties is clearly based on watching a few docos and reading Wikipedia, and totally false to anyone old enough to actually have been there…. I was in my late teens and in Britain when the revolution came. It simply wasn’t anything like that.

There were two types of girls - Dolly Birds…vacuous and in mini-skirts with backcombed hair and batwings eyeliner; and the Bourgeoisie, pseudo-hippy intellectual world changer students. Bartlett’s 19 year old Sandra is not like any 19 year old from 1967, so it’s not surprising that Ella Caldwell isn’t convincing at all in the first act, apart from being far too old and knowing. Her second act Sandra is an archetype we all recognise, and Bartlett uses his own parents as the archetypes for act three. What’s even more difficult to imagine is how the Sandra of act one morphed into the Sandra of act two…they don’t appear to have the same DNA. It’s not clear if it’s a fault of the text or the interpretation/direction. I was disappointed because I was looking forward to Ms Caldwell’s performance, but – for me at least – it didn’t live up to expectations.

If the first act disappoints through lack of truth, it does at least give us all the clichés for good measure…even the Beatles, plus excellent performances from ensemble members Paul Ashcroft (always spot-on in every role) as the stoned malingering student Kenneth, and Jordan Fraser-Trumble as his strictly working class brother, Henry. It’s a pity we don’t get to see Henry in the later acts; it would have been nice to see how a “mediocrity” (in Kenneth’s eyes) developed, but Ashcroft moves nicely through the successful businessman who discards his ideals and onto the aging retiree yearning for the things he always meant to do. Nor is there any hint of HOW Ken and Sandra got trapped in their middle class prison.

But the real highlights of this production are Jem Nicholas (Rosie) and Rory Kelly (Jamie). Both are superb and bring great depth to the roles of the kids, starting at age 15 and 14 and going through to their thirties. In a play which seems devoid of subtext (or at least where the subtext is unrealised) their characters are so rich as to overshadow their parents…clearly NOT the intention. Perhaps it’s because those characters are closest to Bartlett’s age. Nicholas is so real as the teenage Rosie that you are in physical pain for her. Kelly’s portrayal of  Jamie, in his thirties, stoned and with Asperger’s (or worse) is electric. And when Rosie berates her parents for encouraging her to follow her dream (which she wasn’t very good at) rather than insisting on her being conventional, and she yells at them “It’s all your fault” we laugh, but we also wince, and it’s one of the play’s finest moments. Jacob Battista’s set is both functional and nicely measured, making excellent use of the tiny space, and Lawrence’s direction is assured throughout, as one would expect. Clare Springett’s lighting does all that it is meant to.

A very wise and feisty old woman (my mother) once said….  “Whatever you do, your kids are going to blame you and hate you for it; so you might as well do what YOU want.” Ultimately, that’s the conclusion Ken and Sandra reach.

Coral Drouyn

images: Ella Caldwell & Paul Ashcroft, Rory Kelly & Paul Ashcroft, and Rory Kelly & Ella Caldwell. Photographer: Jodie Hutchinson.

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