Sweet Nothings

Synopsis

A young man has an affair with a married woman. He is terrified her husband will challenge him to a duel and kill him. At a party, he flirts with a girl who believes she is truly loved. Life seems full of joy. The doorbell rings. The husband enters the room. The power of sexual longing, the cruelty of tradition, the vulnerability of those in love.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 5 March 2010

European retro chic has swept into the Young Vic with a vengeance in this revival by the great Swiss director Luc Bondy of Arthur Schnitzler’s fin de siècle love and death comedy Liebelei, in a new version by David Harrower; but, excuse me, from which literal translation is Harrower filching his play? Even Faber, the publishers, aren’t letting on.

It’s a glorious staging, indifferently acted by a quartet of hot young performers, with a fatally fidgety and under-powered third act from Kate Burdette as Christine, tangled in lust with Tom Hughes’ decadent Fritz who’s in turn stumbled into a duel as a result of an affair with an (unseen) married woman.

This is Hughes’ stage debut and it shows (he’s scored a hit in the Ian Dury film, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll), but he’s a very handsome young man and he’s well partnered in hedonistic transgression by Jack Laskey’s floppy Theodore, a bespectacled, spiky-haired David Tennant type.

The fourth member o...

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Latest User Review

Suboo - 21 April 2010:

I agree with the above, I wish I had left at the interval, which was so long it only added to late arrival for food and drink at the end. Should have cut out the middle man of the evening. Tedios....

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