Ten years after Mike Bartlett’s Love Love Love premiered, it has returned to the stage. The play is in three acts in different eras with the same baby boomer couple, Sandra (Rachael Stirling) and Kenneth (Nicholas Burns). Their lack of empathy and understanding of their own middle class, white privilege is as relevant and fascinating now as it was in 2010.
The first act is set in 1967, when young Kenneth is staying with his older, sterner brother, Henry (Patrick Knowles). Henry has invited his ‘girlfriend’, Sandra – dressed in a vivid purple dress - round for a romantic evening but she hits it off with dressing gown-wearing Kenneth instantly. They connect over Oxford University and their excitement of ‘things changing’ in London and the future ahead of travelling, getting high and being free. Bartlett’s text captures the language used at the time; the dismissal of feminism and homophobic slurs.
