Love Love Love at The WYP

I was getting myself geared up to Review Goodnight Mr Tom at the WYPlayhouse, and was having flashbacks to the televised adaptations and a production I had seen as a child in Manchester Central Library. I wasn’t massively motivated even though it has a great narrative, but with a last minute +1 otherwise excused an evening of solidarity at the Theatre seemed fitting for a Tuesday.

Happily to my surprise, for whatever reason, I was relegated from the Quarry to the Courtyard Theatre for the opening night of Love Love Love. I asked for the flyer, and got what looked like a wall poster from Dazed & Confused plastered with four & five star ratings from credible Newspapers. Much better suited.
Love Love Love by Mike Bartlett, it read, the flyer boasting Bartlett’s success as a playwright and critical acclaim for his first play, Earthquake. So I guessed this could be considered the difficult second album. It’s about the baby boomer generation ‘as it retires’. Following the life of a couple starting in the swinging 60’s, an era of free will, free love, freethinking, the possibilities of breaking down walls, everything fresh.

I have tended to sway away from the monotonous depiction of the 60’s, mainly to avoid the revulsion of headbands and retrospect (& The Beatles). You had to be there you might say. Yet ‘this affects us too’ … the generation gap exactly what Love Love Love seemed really about.

The plot delivers three momentous consequences in two peoples lives. ActI set in the 60’s plots the jovial disposition of two brothers, Kenneth and Henry, to explore a changing youth. Introducing Sandra, current girlfriend of Henry where on his exit to pick up dinner Sandra forgot, as she was high, the soon becoming future love of Kenneth … with help from the Beatles track ‘All you need is Love’ of course.
ActII, now in the 90’s is the most consequential, showing married Kenneth and Sandra, and children Jamie and Rose in the midst of a family in disrepair. Sandra, a possible alcoholic, has forgotten her daughter’s school violin performance on her 16th Birthday. Where Kenneth questions Sandra about her late arrival, the two in love, in all the bluff and animosity, both now confess, get out the cigarettes, and declare their lust for fresh, uncomplicated, animalist, escapism from monogamy. Kenneth with a 24yr old and Sandra with a gin induced work colleague Chris.

Sandra in divine normality gathers the family, shares out the Birthday Cake, whilst dispelling the foundations of a divorce and how everyone will be happier for it as a result, including the children.

ActIII set in the late 00’s, is shaped around the daughter Rose who has called a family meeting. Sandra now with a geriatric and Kenneth a string of discontent, Rose is left to bare the burden of the family, the pressures of having a career forcing her to ask them to buy her a house. In all the escapade of a family reaching reality in at a boiling point, Rose explodes, matching her mother’s fiery temperament. Following a stern no from the parents, when Rose returns from the garden with her brother she finds Kenneth and Sandra kissing and dancing to the same bloody Beatles track. As happy as this sounds, it is in fact tragic. The two ‘grown’ children are too suffering, unheard, from an overbearing generation too concerned with themselves and an expectation for someone to give all the answers and take responsibility. Blaming the generation above for living in the bubble of the past. The economy, the credit, how value went out of the window and status was welcomed at the door.

Despite the tragedy of it all it was actually very funny, something that flowed from a believable chemistry. But it was the forthright Sandra that really gave a startling performance on stage, managing to sustain the personality of her character. Between Kenneth and her, the casting gave the play integrity, with the audience left incandescent; I left with a complete crush.

The plot adhered to stereotype; directing the play towards the typical and predictable seemed wholly intentional. In all the efforts in doing this put it to one side, an exemplar even, focusing on the importance of Love of a family and all that plays on it. I think Bartlett focussed less at the political detriment, nor the music – perhaps considering the fashionable depiction in the same cynical way I see it. It was clever to take something so complex and reduce it to something we can relate with directly, the trials and tribulations of life and let’s not forget … Love.

Bartlett has written something satirical and tragic, using comedy to pull it together. So I take back the suggestion of the flyer as it says exactly this, and commend a good quality performance.