Review Round-up: Critics Love, Love, Love Mike Bartlett’s latest

Michael Coveney

WhatsOnStage
★★★★★

“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.”

Henry Hitchings
Evening Standard
★★★★

“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.”

Caroline
McGinn
Time
Out
★★★★

“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.”

Michael
Billington
Guardian

★★★★

“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.”

Charles Spencer
Telegraph

★★★★

“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.  “