Paul English and Jillian Murray.
THEATRE
LOVESONG ★★★★
Abi Morgan, Red Stitch Actors Theatre, until September 23
Abi Morgan’s Lovesong is a tear-jerker. A poignant but clear-eyed portrayal of a married couple in the prime of life (and at the end of it), the play swims like the memory of a dream between them.
The four-hander follows Maggie (Jillian Murray) and Billy (Paul English), an elderly childless couple staring down the barrel of Maggie’s terminal illness. Her decision to die looms over the intimate rhythms of their daily life, prompting remembrances of things past.
Murray and English, left, and Maddy Jevic and Dylan Watson as young Maggie and Billy, right.
The structure dances across decades. The two characters share the stage with younger versions of themselves (Dylan Watson and Maddy Jevic) in a spectral dramatic device – beautifully handled by the actors – that sets up time-slips, foreshadowing and moving juxtaposition, and echoes of the many textures of love as it navigates the years.
I think it was Peter Hall who said directing is 90 per cent casting, and Denny Lawrence has taken the dictum to heart. Murray and English carve out a rapport of captivating depth and subtlety. Understated performances convincingly evoke two people who have shared their lives and suffered through conflict, adversity, joy and regret. They know every inch of each other and their companionship has a luminous, valedictory quality, as they give and receive what comfort they can – including leaving a surprising legacy – in a comfortless situation.
The play encapsulates the couple’s ups and downs through the years.
Watson and Jevic erupt into the passions and disillusionments of earlier years. We get them bright-eyed and falling in love, though darker suggestions intrude (mutual jealousies and fear of infidelity, Billy’s borderline alcoholism, Maggie’s pain at not being able to have children) as the song of innocence turns into one of experience.
The imagery and striving for symbolic resonance occasionally seems heavy-handed, and the live cello accompaniment (Campbell Banks) might overdo the air of melancholy. Yet nothing can detract from the delicate and affecting performances which maximise the quiet force of the play’s sharply drawn intimacies.
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