Review: Love in (3) Parts, Southwark Playhouse

Written for WhatsOnStage.com

Lost Dog describe Love in (3) Parts as “a (quite) romantic play.” While this is in part down to its slight and grounded subversion of happily ever after, it is also a world away from the high-blown epics of the romance genre. Eyes don’t meet across a crowded room, chests don’t heave with passion and hearts are set a-twitching rather than aflutter. Gone With The Wind this is not. The trouble is that Love in (3) Parts is ‘quite’ a lot of things, whilst never really amounting to much.

Writer John Shaw’s theory is that relationships inevitably go through three stages: “First, you love the quirks, then they drive you mad, but ultimately you miss them.” So it is between Rob and Claire (Rich W. Burton and Sally Kent). Both are lonely urbanites – he, an obsessive compulsive who eats meals for two with a mirror for company, and she, a workaholic giving constant updates to her dead mother. After a first date teeming with non sequiturs and nervous laughter, they stumble into and out of cohabitation and love, via an endless stream of pizzas, DVDS and wine.

Shaw suggests that with the increasing atomization and unification of a flat-pack flat society, we both need and fear human contact and that, even amidst the everyday, life somehow deserves a soundtrack – here provided by James Day, who ambles freely around the action, peppering it with Damien Rice-like acoustics.

However, while Love in (3) Parts contains some nice ideas, it is ultimately contained by the clumsy blatancy of its words. As a writer, Shaw suffers from compulsive obviousness disorder. Both the relationship itself and Rob’s condition are strings of cliché: lights switched five times, pencils lined up and clothes folded. As a couple, they are so snugly and smugly knit that it’s little wonder they have no social life outside of each other. Shaw presents a world of cutesy post-it notes and children’s books that will enflame even the slightest trace of cynicism within.

And it really is a shame, because everything else around it works well. Burton and Kent find recognizable simplicity and gentle humour in badly-drawn characters. Director Dan Mallaghan maintains sense through a cut-up chronology with a strong sense of location, aided by the low-budget slickness of Kath Singh’s design and Alan Lane’s lighting, and James Dey’s sweetly folksy music coats everything in a layer of (quite) romanticism.

Lost Dog suggest themselves to be a company of promising theatricality burdened by a crippling reliance on clunky text and, as such, the nauseatingly nice, (quite) romantic Love In (3) Parts is just not quite right.