Theatre Preview - Love, Love, Love

It's your fault. All of it. I wanted to tell you. I thought you should know.

As part of the creative team on Tower Theatre's forthcoming production of Love, Love, Love I'm not in a position to write a review. I mean I'd like to tell you what a scintillating evening of drama the show is going to provide. How a highly talented group of actors is going to bring Mike Bartlett's words and story to life in ways that will make the audience laugh uproariously, bridle with outrage and cringe with recognition. How it'll be moving and thought-provoking and divisive and an all-round riveting piece of theatre... but I'm involved, so I can't. Shame, that.

What I can do is talk a bit about the play and its writer, in my usual non-spoilery fashion. 

Bartlett is a darling of stage and screen in Britain right now (King Charles III, Doctor Foster) and has pulled off the trick of being both unerringly smart and populist. I could go into detail regarding his CV, but frankly it's all on Wikipedia and safe to say it's impressive. Love, Love, Love is one of his crowning achievements, showcasing as it does key Bartlett attributes - painstakingly crafted dialogue, wit and emotional savagery. (His language and the way he structures it is truly something to relish. Every word, every pregnant pause is scripted with care. For that alone this play is worth experiencing.)

The most striking aspect of Love, Love, Love, however, is how massive themes (of social change and politics and class) are explored within the confines of one family unit, albeit over several decades. The play leaps during three acts from 1967's Summer of Love to 1990 to the present day, its central characters aging from their late teens to their mid-sixties. What other dramas have done anything similar? Well I can think of Peter Flannery's TV epic Our Friends in the North (nine episodes covering thirty-one years) and the Trainspotting films if you watched them back-to-back (twenty years). But on stage, in a single three-act drama? None spring to mind. (Set me straight with multiple examples in the comments section below, please.) 

The remarkable thing about the Love, Love, Love time leaps is how the play creates an impression of lives lived in between - of shared memory and experience. From three glimpses of these characters and their children on key occasions in their lives, we see an entire family trajectory - full of love, acrimony, hope, disenchantment, anger, accusation and... well, more love. There are enough emotional fireworks here to burn down a theatre - and they pay off because Bartlett has written his characters like they've lived in each other's pockets a hell of a long time. It's as funny as it is tragic, as moving as it is infuriating. But that's family life, right?

So ultimately, what's the play about? In essence it's a story of the post-War Baby Boomers and whether or not their actions screwed over subsequent generations. Yes, that's all. It's a bit like that line from Don Henley's Boys of Summer about seeing 'a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac' - the Grateful Dead fan who's traded in his '60s idealism and embraced the capitalist dream. However Bartlett goes a step further and questions the whole meaning and validity of the Summer of Love in the first place. 

Oh - it's also about parents and children and trying to bridge the generational divide and about whether love can sustain over a lifetime.

Basically, it's about a lot of stuff. But one thing it's not about is easy answers. Are the post-War generation smug and complacent sell-outs? Are their children a bunch of slackers who won't take responsibility for their own lives? Those questions are best thrashed out in the pub afterwards. This is primarily a play to make us laugh, to make us angry and to make us think. 

Tower Theatre's production of Love, Love, Love can be seen at Theatro Technis, Camden from 23-27 May (7.30pm, matinee Sat. 27 at 3.00pm). It may well be a vital and enthralling piece of theatre, taking you on a roller-coaster of emotion laced with satirical wit - a razor-sharp revisiting of a modern classic. Again, that's not for me to say.

But you'll want to have an opinion, won't you?