Love

Love, a show which took UK audiences by storm, was greeted with widespread critical acclaim. The setting for the play is Great Britain, in temporary accommodation rented by social services. It provides shelter to a handful of individuals of different ages and origins: migrants, unemployed or homeless pensioners. The accommodation is cramped but transitory, a quick solution (in theory) until its occupants can be rehoused. Alexander Zeldin invites us to step inside, and share in some of the touching, humorous, and profoundly human instants of their combined existence. The duration of their stay, underscored by tensions and emotional outbursts, is also characterized by that of waiting: waiting for a kettle to boil, or for the bathroom to be free, or the kitchen. There is also waiting of a different kind, that of waiting to be able to go somewhere else. To begin a life or or live out what is left of it, beyond the mere satisfaction of basic needs. Onstage, the protagonists show their capacity for enduring suffering of all kinds, ranging from the humiliation of promiscuity, to the temptations of conflict and violence. Behind the apparent emptiness of this incessant waiting is, however, a struggle for dignity.  Carried off by an outstanding cast of immense sensitivity, the air is pregnant not just with expectation, but with dreams. With a lightness of touch, the show takes the extreme simplicity of the various exchanges and everyday occurrences, and converts the information into emotion. In doing so, it makes us sit up and listen to words which we have become all too accustomed to hearing.

#ntLOVE