Love, Love, Love

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

THE EPISODIC black comedy Love, Love, Love, takes place over three acts, set in 1967, 1990 and this year. Selfishness and the absence of responsibility are the themes that watermark Mike Bartlett's crowd-pleasing play, which follows fantastically self-absorbed couple Kenneth (played with relish by Ben Addis) and Sandra (Lisa Jackson) across the decades.

London, 1967. Student Kenneth is lounging on the sofa, chain-smoking, dreaming, listening to the Beatles, and drinking his days away in his brother Henry’s (Simon Darwen) flat. Kenneth’s outfit of choice, a dressing gown, worn over a bare chest, refuses to stay closed. By contrast, sensible, employed Henry is literally buttoned up from neck to navel. And thus it is with their contrasting attitudes to life.

So it’s no surprise that when Henry’s date turns up, the stoned and squiffy Sandra finds Kenneth far more entertaining. Fidelity? Fiddlesticks to that. They are 19. It’s the 1960s.

For all its baby-boomer period references, Bartlett’s play is essentially about an unhappy, unfaithful, alcohol-fuelled marriage, and its predictable impact on the next neglected generation. Sandra fears ageing so much that her emotional intelligence remains fixed in 1969. Kenneth will do anything to dodge conflict; he never really leaves the sofa we first see him lying on.

By 1990, wine glasses attached permanently to their hands, they are married with teenage children, Rose (Rosie Wyatt) and Jamie (James Barrett, eerily compelling in what’s not much more than a cameo role).

In a family where there’s only room for one female, Rose is patronised and provoked into finally making a statement that underlines its dysfunctionality. As for Kenneth, he’s ruthlessly dispatched from the marriage over slices of Rose’s birthday cake.

One of the unanswered mysteries of the script is how two people so clearly dedicated to alcohol hold down unidentified well-paid jobs over decades. Because by 2011, Rose is adrift and back at a family reunion, demanding money from her wealthy parents.

Even if they didn’t get it all, Sandra and Kenneth always knew exactly what they wanted: they were entirely responsible for their destinies. Neither the troubled Rose nor the by-now pathetic Jamie appear to have taken any responsibility for their own choices. It’s difficult to tell whose lives are the poorer and more pitiful as a result.

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