Stirling’s tour de force is simply AbFab
Love, Love, Love (Lyric Hammersmith) Verdict: Welcome revival ★★★★✩
Love, Love, Love, mike Bartlett’s play about the divide between the generations, is now a decade old. It shows the progress (if that’s the right word) of a disgraceful pair of 1960s hippies, from their youth in 1967, to the dissolution of their marriage in 1990, to their disreputable old age in 2011.
Does it still work in its current production at the Lyr i c Hammersmith? Yes. If anything it’s acquired an additional frisson in the era of Greta thunberg — ‘You’ve stolen our future!’ — and the generational divide between cushy, propertied boomers and their Generation Rent children.
In 1967, all the angst was far away, in an era when the young and optimistic got worked up about vietnam and the Bomb (actually far greater threats than climate change) through a haze of pot. Such are Sandra and Ken, who don’t have to worry about much because they’re on a grant at oxford — though she’s just been sacked from her job in a boutique for blowing pot smoke at a customer. outrage!
their relationship starts as they mean to go on, by sidelining manual worker Henry, Ken’s brother, who fancies Sandra but is elbowed aside by this gilded pair.
as Sandra, Rachael Stirling simply steals the show, every act of it. though I did admire Patrick Knowles’s menacing Henry, who seems perpetually on the brink of murdering his layabout sibling.
Stirling is in her element as the fabulously selfish hippy in a mini. there’s more than a bit of absolutely Fabulous about her in middle age, as the pair live in dull prosperity. ‘Look at us,’ wails nicholas Burns’s Ken. ‘We’re living in Reading!’ (the play must go down a storm there.)
In fact, the last act, where the couple’s daughter reads them the riot act, is abFab in a nutshell. and it all comes down to money, which 37-year-old Rose (Isabella Laughland) takes more seriously than the hippies, on account of not having any.
the play still strikes a chord. my 13-year-old daughter came over all Greta thunberg on the way home from it. I’m with Sandra.