Love, Love, Love

Mike Bartlett’s three-act saga Love, Love, Love lands at Red Stitch a finely tuned piece of inter-generational critique.

Charting over four decades the pre-life, life and after-life of an English couple’s relationship, the play does in two-and-a-half hours what Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood did over ten years: follow ever-deepening characters as they breed, stagnate, fall in and out of love, and find themselves facing uncannily familiar problems. Beginning in the swinging ‘60s, flying tempestuously through 1990 and bunking down in our current decade, Kenneth (Paul Ashcroft) and Sandra (Ella Caldwell), and their kids Rosie (Jem Nicholas) and Jamie (Rory Kelly), shed the regionality of their accents as The Beatles cede to The Stone Roses and David Guetta. 

It’s beyond the conventional references to sexual revolution, picket lines and social media, and past the play’s domestic tensions that Bartlett’s sharpness cuts. Rarely is a cigarette unlit or bottle of wine un-open. Politics of addiction and compulsion — not only to substances — circulate toxically under the floorboards of this middle-class living room. The declining mental health of Rosie and Jamie is one of many subtle consequences. 

The cast combines with director Denny Lawrence to offer a refined expression of Bartlett’s text. Some moments, including Rosie’s entitlement rant, were riveting for their rawness, while Ashcroft and Caldwell compellingly embody the vicissitudes of passion, success and obligation that perhaps continue to perplex the “love generation”.