Strained love: Ben Miles (Kenneth) and Victoria Hamilton (Sandra). Picture by Johan Persson
Play: Love Love Love
Theatre: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Playwright: Mark Bartlett
Review by Julie Tomlin
In Love Love Love Mike Bartlett turns a critical eye on the lives and legacy of the Baby Boomer generation.
Pacy, energetic and often sharp and funny, the play tells the story of a couple who meet in 1967 – on the night of the first global TV show when the Beatles sang All You Need Is Love; when the world seemed to belong to the young.
Self-obsessed and bohemian Sandra, played brilliantly by Victoria Hamilton, quickly bypasses solid and dependable Henry (Sam Troughton) for his brother Kenneth, played by Ben Miles. “We’re going to die, and we shouldn’t waste our lives,” is how Sandra coaxes Kenneth into overcoming his reluctance to hurt Henry.
Bartlett, who is only 32, focuses on the domestic lives and preoccupations of the characters, and avoids any clunkiness or preachiness about the wider political issues of how the Baby Boomers trashed the world for everyone else.
In the second act of the two hours and 40 minutes play, both Ben Miles and Victoria Hamilton make a swift and convincing transition into a couple in their 40s who, despite all their dreaming, are living in Reading with their two children Rose and Jamie, played by Claire Foy and George Rainsford.
We don’t know how exactly, but their dreams appear to have been co-opted. Instead hard work and consumption have become the focus of their ambitions. Frustrated and disappointed, they don’t really know if they want to be parents or friends to their children.
It is a credit to Bartlett and director James Grieve that the play never drags, leaving the audience eager to see the next stage in the awful and hilarious life of this occasionally endearing couple.
Underneath, this is really a tale of white middle class aspiration and neurosis. Accusing a generation of taking everything and ruining it all for future generations doesn’t entirely reflect how the pie of socio-economic wellbeing was divided up back then or indeed now.
Sandra, who went to Oxford, sees her life from the perspective of a woman who had to fight her way in a male dominated world. “We didn’t just climb the ladder, women like me, we made it, we built it,” she tells her daughter Rose.
Kenneth, who saw his scholarship to Oxford as a way out of the humdrum and mundane world of his parents, believes he has earned his comfortable retirement by the time we reach 2011 and the third act.
Both of them seem oblivious to the fact that their children are making their way in a very different world. It’s not surprising that Rose is angry. She was told by her mother that she could have it all only to find herself without a flat, a partner or children and saddled with debt.
In the first two acts of the play, Bartlett’s characters speak rapidly, their words tumbling out. In the third they hit the mark without exception. By the end though Bartlett seems to suggest that the jury is still out on whether the next generation will be up to the task of building a better world.
Love Love Love is on until 9 June.
Website: www.royalcourttheatre.com