Use the form below to search for tickets on your desired date. Dates from
Synopsis Beane is an exile form life - an oddball. His well-meaning sister Joan and brother-in-law Harry try and make time for him in their busy lives, but on one can get through. After Beane's apartment is burgled, Joan is baffled to find her brother blissfully happy and tries to unravel the story behind Beane's mysterious new love Molly.
Irish screen star Cillian Murphy made his West End debut alongside Hollywood’s Neve Campbell, Michael McKean and Kristen Johnston in the European premiere of romantic comedy Love Song, at the New Ambassadors Theatre on Monday (4 December 2006, following previews from 25 November, See News, 13 Oct 2006).
John Kolvenbach’s play, directed by John Crowley, focuses on oddball Beane (Murphy). His well-meaning sister Joan (Johnston) and brother-in-law Harry (McKean) try and make time for him in their busy lives, but no one can get through. After Beane’s apartment is burgled, Joan is baffled to find her brother blissfully happy and tries to unravel the story behind Beane's mysterious new love Molly (Campbell).
First night critics were divided about the merits of the piece, generally awarding either two or four stars. They said the play is a cross between a run-of-the-mill sit-com and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with darker elements and the story of Harvey thrown into the mix. While some found the ideas intriguing, others found the play's messages confusing and didn’t warm to the characters. However, all reviewers enjoyed the performances of the starry cast, and praised Crowley’s slick direction, while one said it is the best play to hit the West End this year.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (4 stars) – “This is an odd, intriguing little play…. it is so beautifully acted in John Crowley’s production that impatience gives way to absorption. Cillian Murphy’s bearded, introverted Beane becomes a transfigured eccentric. The play is spun from deft, often very funny, shards of dialogue and a sort of embarrassingly precise detail…. Murphy is a perfect study in suspended animation. Neve Campbell as Molly displays the right urchin, playful qualities that incorporate mischievous criminal tendencies without condoning them.... As Kolvenbach demonstrated in his On An Average Day… he does write stuff actors can fashion into good theatrical performances. Joan and Harry are delightfully played by two visiting American actors with solid credentials and several Emmy and Grammy awards between them. Kristen Johnston is like a young Kathleen Turner, a really sharp actress with an earthy presence and lethal comic timing. Michael McKean looks a little like Tim Pigott-Smith, with the same sort of understated technical assurance. Crowley’s production, very well designed by Scott Pask, and lit by Howard Harrison, is full of love rock songs on the soundtrack that comment ironically on Beane’s predicament and help along a short, ninety-minute play (no interval) that sticks in the memory.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian (2 stars) – “Do you remember Elwood P Dowd? He was the crazy drunk who imagined he was accompanied by a 6ft rabbit in Mary Chase's Harvey. Well, the hero of this new 90-minute play by John Kolvenbach suffers comparable delusions. Everyone's entitled to his fantasies, but I'm surprised to find such attenuated whimsy from Chicago's hard-headed Steppenwolf Theatre…. Admittedly Kolvenbach's play has a few flicks of wit and an arch playfulness: Cillian Murphy's wild-eyed, straggle-bearded Beane wrestles amusingly with a multiple-choice quiz, and there's a nice moment when Michael McKean as his brother-in-law confesses to sexual arousal from the aroma of cantaloupe melons. But behind the play lurks that reverence for madness and delusion that runs through a lot of American drama…. John Crowley's production is deftly designed by Scott Pask…. I have no quarrel with the performances – Neve Campbell's briskly invasive Molly, and Kristen Johnston's domineering Joan. But Molly and Beane's love-chat only strives for lyricism; and when the illusory heroine cries "Death to literalism", I began to yearn for the attentiveness to the actual that once characterised American theatre. This is Harvey for hipsters with a burglar replacing a bunny.”
Benedict Nightingale in the Times (4 stars) – Nightingale also compared the play to Harvey, but far more favourably: “For Elwood P Dowd, the affable drunk in Mary Chase’s Harvey, the imaginary companion that brought salvation was the vast rabbit of the title. For Cillian Murphy’s Beane, the scraggy loser at the centre of John Kolvenbach’s equally funny but more serious Love Song, it’s Neve Campbell’s Molly… who arrives in his apartment exuding all the truculence that poor passive Beane can’t let himself express or even feel…. At first the play struck me as a superior sitcom, or Neil Simon pastiche, or maybe a watered-down rerun of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?…. Yet Love Song is also a play about urban ennui…. There’s a level at which Love Song is depressing, suggesting as it does that in our world happiness is to be found only in fantasy…. And Kolvenbach adds to the slight sense of sentimentality by failing to suggest that Molly liberates Beane’s hidden aggression as well as his thwarted capacity for joy. Yet this is an intelligent play with a wise ending and, thanks to John Crowley’s direction, a crisp, well-acted one too.”
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (2 stars) – “Producer Sonia Friedman valiantly battles to save straight plays from being edged out of a West End where theatreowners crave musicals. I doubt, though, whether her latest import… will ring many bells. The play's blush-makingly trite idea, which the author's robust humour and bursts of poetic lyricism make more acceptable, is that love from Neve Campbell's monotonously aggressive burglar, Molly, can restore Cillian Murphy's chronically introverted Beane to normal life, behaviour and feelings…. I was never really hooked…. Murphy's bearded, semi-detached looking Beane gives a performance of such riveting poignancy that he tended to make me gloss over the ruminative silliness of Love Song's contentions. Murphy beautifully captures both this bemused mental state and Beane's excited loquacious joy in sight of his fantasy girlfriend…. His transformation, whether magic or whimsical, is not the stuff of drama in John Crowley's stylish production.”
Sheridan Morley in the Express – “The problem with John Kolvenbach’s new Love Song at the New Ambassadors is that it can’t quite decide what it wants to be when it grows up into a fully-fledged play. It starts out as what could well be the promising pilot for a TV sitcom about a couple of amiably squabbling adults and her thoroughly eccentric younger brother, played in a masterly display of lonely disillusion and alienation by Cillian Murphy… and Neve Campbell… playing an oddball girlfriend who matches Murphy eccentricity for eccentricity. It eventually becomes clear that this is a play about the nature of reality itself…. But through a sequence of (usually) quickfire duologues, the director John Crowley has to carve a path which takes in comedy and sadness, love and loathing, reality and fantasy and this in 90 no-interval minutes is no easy task. We are in an American domestic wilderness here, and though the cast navigate it admirably, the terrible truth is that you can never quite care about any of them enough to have it matter whether they end up happy or sad, lonely or loved, in the real world or one of their own fantasy…. the play drifts around, as do its central characters, in search of a defining theme, and it’s one that we can never quite hear in the song.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph – “While it's true that musicals have dominated the West End in 2006, drama has actually fared surprisingly well…. This encouraging trend continues with John Kolvenbach's outstanding Love Song, cannily cast by the producer Sonia Friedman, and unmistakably announcing itself as one of the best new plays of the year… by turns funny, touching and profound…. The play's central character, Beane (the tremendous Cillian Murphy), is one of life's weirdos…. But then, suddenly, miraculously, our hero falls in love, with a mysterious, punky and equally troubled young woman called Molly whom he discovers burgling his flat. The silent, suffering Beane, who in Murphy's nervily compelling performance looks like a traumatised Christ, suddenly becomes vocal and full of beans, embracing life with fierce pleasure as he vociferously celebrates the joy of sex. And his happiness rubs off on his workaholic sister, until now happiest when making office interns cry, and on her husband. From seeming like an incipient George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, drinking like fish and quarrelling, the married couple rediscover their own passion and love for each other. All this might sound mawkish and sentimental, but in John Crowley's beautifully judged and splendidly acted production it proves both richly comic and deeply touching…. If this smashing, compassionate new play fails to take the town, then there really will be cause for concern in the West End.”
This is an odd, intriguing little play, written by American author John Kolvenbach, premiered earlier this year at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, in which a mysterious young holy fool, Beane, falls in love with the girl, Molly, who has burgled his not-worth-burgling apartment.
Beane – no relation of Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean - has a sister, Joan, who leads a busy professional life, although we do not know what she does. Joan’s husband, Harry, is also worried about Beane, but not so much. They live in a sleek, well-appointed home, whereas Beane’s ceiling descends slowly, as if to crush him. Molly may or may not exist. Once bolted on to Beane’s life, she becomes his own mirror image. She wears the same clothes as him. She keeps his cup in her pocket and kisses it. As an architect-hating thief, arsonist and all-purpose “liberator” she also shows loner Beane how to live. He becomes verbose and decides to try “people.”
Thus expressed, baldly and literally, the play sounds ridiculous. But it is so beautifully acted in John Crowley’s production that impatience gives way to absorption. Cillian Murphy’s bearded, introverted Beane becomes a transfigured eccentric. The play is spun from deft, often very funny, shards of dialogue and a sort of embarrassingly precise detail – Harry remembers that Joan first smelt of ripe cantaloupe melon; Beane was bullied on a school bus by a boy pecking at his neck with a pencil – that is utterly convincing.
There is a lovely scene in a restaurant, where Beane discovers the joys of a turkey sandwich and smothers the waiter (James Scales) in unnecessary compliments, and a weird one where Joan reinvents her libido while telling her brother about the loss of an earlier boyfriend.
Murphy is a perfect study in suspended animation. Neve Campbell as Molly displays the right urchin, playful qualities that incorporate mischievous criminal tendencies without condoning them. As she and Murphy play out their fantasy relationship – how they might have met, swimming nude, devouring each other - you feel the dialogue might qualify for a bad sex award, but it just pulls itself together in time.
As Kolvenbach demonstrated in his On An Average Day (an average, sub-Sam Shepard play seen here four years ago starring Woody Harrelson and Kyle MacLachlan), he does write stuff actors can fashion into good theatrical performances.
Joan and Harry are delightfully played by two visiting American actors with solid credentials and several Emmy and Grammy awards between them. Kristen Johnston is like a young Kathleen Turner, a really sharp actress with an earthy presence and lethal comic timing. Michael McKean looks a little like Tim Pigott-Smith, with the same sort of understated technical assurance.
Crowley’s production, very well designed by Scott Pask, and lit by Howard Harrison, is full of love rock songs on the soundtrack that comment ironically on Beane’s predicament and help along a short, ninety-minute play (no interval) that sticks in the memory.
An absolutely charming play with, it seemed to me, the concept of acceptance at its heart. I don't want to give away the twist, but the final scene between Joan and Beane was heartbreaking. She loves him for who he is, however unconventional, so she was happy to accept, and even encourage, his flights of fancy, provided it made him happy. And Beane's happiness had such a positive effect on Joan and Harry's marriage. A delightful evening that we all enjoyed (ranging in age from 26 to 72). Super performances all round, with Kristen Johnston's comic timing a particular pleasure. - 62.56.98.226)
27 Jan 07
A much more entertaining night than reviews had led me to expect. The performances are superb and, after a hard day at work, anything that makes me laugh out loud as much as the opening scene did has to be applauded. - 84.233.149.230)
24 Jan 07
Somehow, I was expecting a RomCom, not an intriguing, quirky number ! I'm not convinced by the play, but you can't fault the staging and the performances. Fascinating, but not entirely satisfying. - 86.144.100.101)
11 Jan 07
quite enjoyed this, and I liked the twist - 83.146.15.228)
09 Jan 07
I found this a hugely satisfying piece of theatre. John Crowley's slick, glossy production made me laugh and think, and features four fine performances. In fact, Cillian Murphy's heartbreaking depiction of the alienated lost soul driven into his own imagination to find love and connection with Neve Campbell's feisty Molly is one of the highlights of the year. The confessional scene with Kristen Johnston's deliciously bossy sister made me cry. Wolvenbach's quirky, funky, ultimately haunting script is a genuine original. Highly recommended. - 89.145.233.212)
27 Dec 06
Exactly what the West End needs a good, solid new play. The starry cast give excellent performances without reducing the play to a star vehicle. That said the play is not without it's flaws, and is possibly too sitcom for my tastes. It's short, snappy and worth seeing, especially to add some variety to the musicals everywhere else. - 81.151.179.213)
20 Dec 06
John Kolvenbach's 'On An Aversage Day' had a successful West End run a few years ago and in many ways 'Love Song' is similar. It deals with a psychologically disturbed young man and his relationship with a sibling, in this case an older sister. Although it threatens to be one of those plays that you have to try to decipher, all loose ends are satisfactorilly tied up by the end, unlike the excecrable 'Cryptogram' recently suffered round the corner at the Donmar. The acting is superb throughout, particularly as Molly Regan stepped in at very short notice to take over the role of the sister. It is also good to see Michael McKean in London; he is one of those actors whose face is much more familiar than his name from countless TV and film appearances - he does a nice line in amused bewilderment. I suspect 'Love Song' might divide audiences but for me, particularly if he can broaden his subject range, John Kolvenbach ranks alongside Neil La Bute as the most interesting "new" American writers. - 62.6.139.13)
15 Dec 06
Absolutely spell-binding! A wonderful play that completely absorbs you. Worth ninety minutes of anyone's time! - 195.10.16.72)
06 Dec 06
I quite enjoyed this production (so maybe nearer a 4 really). It is a simple "charming" play that is very well acted and has a really cool modern soundtrack. Despite the raft of Hollywood names in the cast, it is neither starry or pretentious. Cillian Murphy was very good as was Kristin Johnson but in general all the acting was of a decent standard. Lets hope this production lasts its run as boy does the west end need some good drama. - 195.167.131.130)
Opened 5 Jun 1913. The Mousetrap opened here on 25 Nov 52 (a palindromic date - 25/11/52) and later transferred to St Martin's (Mar74). 460 seats. Likely to be split in two under a major re-design by William Dudley. From 1996 for a couple of years this theatre housed the Royal Court Upstairs while their Sloane Square theatre was refurbished. After refurbishment it was re-opened as the New Ambassadors. An [ATG] member. Society of London Theatre member. Following acquirition by Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen in April 2007 the theatre name reverted to The Ambassadors
Whatsonstage.com - Discount London theatre tickets, theatre news and reviews, Theatre videos, Theatre discussion, National Theatre Listings. Covering London's West End, all of Theatreland and all UK theatre. The best
for London Theatre Ticket Discounts.
