Synopsis 1967. Kenneth and Sandra meet, and it's a whole new world. A fiery relationship is sparked in the haze of the 60s, and charred by today's brutal realities. From passion to paranoia, Love, Love, Love takes on the baby boomer generation as it retires, and finds it full of trouble. Age Guidance 14+ Downstairs
Dates: Opens 03 May 2012. 19:30. May 5,12,19,24,26, Jun 2 Mats 14:30. May 3 at 19:00 29 May 2012 19:30 - Open Captioned (STAGETEXT) 02 June 2012 14:30 - Audio Described
1967. Kenneth and Sandra meet, and it’s a whole new world. A fiery relationship is sparked in the haze of the 60s, and charred by today’s brutal realities. From passion to paranoia, Love, Love, Love takes on the baby boomer generation as it retires, and finds it full of trouble. Victoria Hamilton and Ben Miles as Kenneth and Sandra, morph from care free teenagers into modern day adults about to retire on generous pensions, conveniently missing by a thread the financial crisis that has befallen their children. Director James Grieve brings to life Mike Bartlett’s tale of a generation that had it all and wasted it away. Love, Love, Love is now playing at the Royal Court from 27 April to 9 June 2012.
“Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love is one of the most ambitious and most accomplished domestic dramas in a long while and in James Grieve’s fine production boasts two performances by Victoria Hamilton and Ben Miles that will surely feature at the year’s end in all the awards lists… Bartlett reveals a fine talent for the Shavian rant, having earned the right with a strong theatrical set-up. While Sandra and Kenneth may sound a little like characters evoking the sixties rather than living them, the shift in social tectonic plates is brilliantly done… Hamilton gives a ravishing display of huskily-voiced self-centredness… Bartlett’s play … is an act of revenge by one generation on another. As such, it’s a classic Court play with an authentic noise of anger and resentment. It’s also very funny, brilliantly designed by Lucy Osborne, and cheeringly given the full main-stage treatment that should ensure the sort of maximum cultural impact once the province of John Osborne and, more recently, David Hare and Jez Butterworth.”
“Piercingly funny and illuminated by some beautifully nuanced performances - notably from Victoria Hamilton… The plotting edges towards the schematic and sometimes context is strangely absent … Yet the writing is observant and James Grieve’s production, though it sags at a couple of points, mainly has a lucid intensity. It is the superb Hamilton and Miles, who over the course of nearly three hours have to portray both teenagers and characters in their sixties, who make the most telling impression. Hamilton appears especially to relish the blithe awfulness of Sandra. But plaudits also go to Bartlett, who leaves us thinking that love, despite its rewards, definitely isn’t all you need.”
Quentin Letts Daily Mail ★★★★★
“This play seltzer-fizzes with indignation (and bad language) but is laced with enough humour and dramatic verve that by the end of the last preview the audience was roaring its approval … Throughout, the acting is top notch, the pace of James Grieve’s direction just right. The one tin-ear moment is when Mr Bartlett has Rosie bawl at her parents that their generation voted for Thatcher, Blair and Cameron … Otherwise, this is an exciting evening, dart-sharp, horribly true. ‘Love, love, love,’ sing The Beatles, as the babyboomer adults (who never grew up) embark on another episode of self-absorption, leaving the next generation once again to clear up the mess.”
“Bartlett is a big talent and, although this play's arguments seem less fresh than they did two years ago, it still sparkles in James Grieve's stylish, sexy production. Victoria Hamilton is its star … She and Ben Miles's Ken are a suburban Taylor and Burton - Bartlett exaggerates the damage they do to their children. But it's no good. Rosie's critique of her parents sounds didactic and dull despite its essential truth. Ken and Sandra's love hurts everyone around them but it heats up the stage. In the final scene you're still rooting for the appalling duo as they float away from the demands of their kidults - whose misfortunes they cannot, after all, be wholly blamed for - on a cloud of nostalgia and boozecruise wine, into their extended personal sunset.”
“Rivetingly watchable … As a survivor of the 60s, I think Bartlett is unfair to a decade that saw Britain become a better, more tolerant place ... But he offers a wholly persuasive portrait of a couple who typify some of the less attractive aspects of the period, including its naivety and narcissism. James Grieve's production also boasts a peach of a performance from Victoria Hamilton, who moves brilliantly from the floaty sylph of the 60s to the fitness-conscious female of the present while suggesting they remain the same person. Ben Miles makes a similarly convincing journey from student scrounger to rural retiree without losing his self-absorption. Claire Foy as the couple's accusatory daughter, George Rainsford as their reclusive son and Sam Troughton as Kenneth's strait-laced brother are also first-rate in a play in which Bartlett exhilaratingly combines the domestic and the epic.”
“Wow, this one packs a punch. In a theatre famous for encouraging angry young men, Mike Bartlett, a writer in his early thirties, lands some knock-out blows on the complacency and selfishness of the have-it-all baby- boomer generation. First seen on tour in 2010, and now revived by the Court in a thrilling high voltage co-production with Paines Plough, this is a play that has you laughing uproariously at one moment and wincing painfully the next. Compared with Bartlett’s big, baggy state of the nation dramas at the NT, this is a chamber piece, with just five characters. But it strikes me as Bartlett’s best work to date, with deeper characterisation, more personal themes, and scenes of extraordinary intensity and emotional truth shot through with dark humour... Victoria Hamilton brilliantly manages to be both beguiling and vile as the hard-drinking, crassly insensitive Sandra, and there is equally fine work from Ben Miles as her husband, who seems superficially nicer but is actually equally selfish and complacent. There are also haunting, heart-wrenching performances from Claire Foy and George Rainsford as their damaged children, and one leaves the theatre in no doubt that the Court has another timely, hard-hitting success on its hands. "
Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love is one of the most ambitious, and most accomplished, domestic dramas in a long while and in James Grieve’s fine production boasts two performances by Victoria Hamilton and Ben Miles that will surely feature at the year’s end in all the awards lists.
They play Sandra and Kenneth, trippy hippy lovers at Oxford in the late 1960s, then embittered parents in 1990 (“We live in Reading; something’s gone wrong”) and finally selfishly reunited old friends in 2011.
Why the “selfish”? It is Bartlett’s fashionable, reactionary (and deeply flawed) view that the baby-boomers, beneficiaries of the post-war re-build and new moral laxity, have spoilt the world for their children.
[WOS_QU@TE]#In some ways, Bartlett's play is an act of revenge by one generation on another#[/WOS_QU@TE]In a coruscating third act the couple’s daughter, Rose (Claire Foy), an impecunious musician who can’t afford a child, a house or a car, accuses her parents not of changing the world, but of buying it. Their son, Jamie (George Rainsford), is a monosyllabic, unemployed iPad geek sharing a home and a wine collection with his indolent father.
As in 13, his underrated dystopian epic at the National last year, Bartlett reveals a fine talent for the Shavian rant, having earned the right with a strong theatrical set-up. While Sandra and Kenneth may sound a little like characters evoking the sixties rather than living them, the shift in social tectonic plates is brilliantly done.
The first upheaval is Kenneth’s snaffling of Sandra from under the nose of his elder brother, Henry (Sam Troughton), a working-class billboard poster man who’s caught the eye of a passing “bird”. That “bird,” like Kenneth, is at Oxford and the druggy die is cast.
[W@S_IMG]#http://www.whatsonstage.com/images/LoveLoveLove_RoyalCourt_360.jpg###Claire Foy & Ben Miles in Love, Love, Love[/W@S_IMG]The expected split between brothers is left unexplored as the play accelerates to the domestic jungle with accusations of infidelity and Sandra’s drinking causing deep unhappiness all round. The echoes of the Beatles’ song of the title (as in, “All You Need Is...”) suggest that love is usually never enough.
Hamilton gives a ravishing display of huskily-voiced self-centredness while Miles, unrecognisable as the lolloping student of the first act, drifts into middle-aged soulless inertia then retired material smugness (earning £60,000 a year without doing anything) in a natural, utterly convincing dramatic progression.
In some ways, Bartlett’s play – co-produced by the Court with Paines Plough in association with the Drum Theatre Plymouth – is an act of revenge by one generation on another. As such, it’s a classic Court play with an authentic noise of anger and resentment.
It’s also very funny, brilliantly designed by Lucy Osborne, and cheeringly given the full main-stage treatment that should ensure the sort of maximum cultural impact once the province of John Osborne and, more recently, David Hare and Jez Butterworth.
Our day in London was competely ruined by the cancellation of our much anticipated visit to see Love, Love, Love by Mike Bartlett, our favourite of the new generation of writers, which we did not find out about until arriving at the Royal Court. Whilst the reason for the cancellation was very sad, and we express our sympathies to Ben Miles, the Royal Court's handling of the situation was completely unprofessional. They are happy to accept a substantial subsidy from the taxpayer as well as lucrative sponsorship from Coutts, but are too penny-pinching to employ understudies for evetualities such as this. At no time have they asked if audiences would prefer to see an under-rehearsed understudy rather than no performance at all - I am pretty sure what most people who have bought tickets would choose, particularly if they have taken annual leave and incurred travel and other expenses to visit a theatre. What made things worse was the attitude of staff at the Royal Court who just informed us that our tickets had already been refunded with no discussion at all about possible alternatives - they even refunded less than the full amount until we chased them for a full reimbursement. There has often been a rather unattractive air of arrogance about the Royal Court, as if the common herd of any audience outside SW1 is very low on their list of priorities. Artistically it can be a very rewarding venue but beofre booking any tickets in the future we will need to remember that they have no contingency plans for problems and don't seem to care how much they inconvenience their customers. - Jackie & David Baxter
26 May 12
Despite being a little didactic in Act 3, this is one of my favourite productions of the year. I agree with DW that the play is morally complex and ambiguous. I've never felt so unduly fond of such incredibly selfish characters. The play explores the allure of indulgent behaviour, it's positive consequences as well as it's negative consequences. The issues dealt with in this play are some of the defining issues of our lives today. The balancing act of life, hinted at eons ago by Hillel ("If I am not for myself, who am I? If I am not for others, who am I? If not now, then when?") about who we live our lives for, is a difficult one, and Mike Bartlett explores all it's permutations wonderfully. Victoria Hamilton's Sandra wants to live her life to the fullest, and selfishly bulldozes her way through other people in the most breezy delightful way. This is a tragi-comic performance of immense dimensions, as Sandra never loses touch with her conscience, and the pain of her own selfish decisions come to haunt her over generations. Ben Miles is wonderful too as her life-partner, so good I didn't even know it was him in act 1. This is a much better play than Betrayal, which he was in recently. Like in Betrayal, characters in relationships betray each other, but here the focus is not on some fatalistic jigsaw of how it happens, but a loving portrayal of human beings, with all our flaws. The cast is flawless, and Claire Foy and Sam Troughton offer impeccable support. I love love love this production. - steveatplays
12 May 12
I loved this play (and the production) as much as Coveney seems to, but I actually think it's a good deal more complex than he gives it credit for. In Ben Miles' and Victoria Hamilton's performances, anyway, Kenneth and Sandra--selfish as they often are--emerged as characters whom the audience (my companions and I, anyway) found engaging, understandable, and funny. Far from the blame-the-boomers "act of revenge" that Mr. Coveney describes, I believe the play is morally complex and ambiguous, positively Chekhovian in its emotional appeal. - DW
The first theatre opened as The New Chelsea on 16 Apr 1870. Changed name to Belgravia. Re-opened as Royal Court 25 Jan 1871. Demolished in 1887. New theatre opened (current, slightly different site) 24 Sep 1888. Famous for supporting and commissioning new writing. Probably the first UK Theatre to regularly include their URL in advertising. Member of the Society of London Theatre. In 1996 the theatre closed for redevelopment, funded by the National Lottery. The refurbished theatre at Sloane Square re-opened in February 2000 including two theatres the 389 seat Jerwood Theatre Downstairs and the studio style Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.
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