Review: Aspects of Love, Menier Chocolate Factory

Written for Time Out

Returning to Aspects of Love after his original West End staging was deemed overblown in 1989, Trevor Nunn opts for simplicity second time around. For the most part, it works fairly well, albeit without ever really inspiring.

Rather than demanding rousing, memorable numbers like the soaring signature Love Changes Everything, the Menier's intimacy allows Lloyd Webber's score its intelligent cartwheel of subtle refrains. Even scaled down and more supple, however, Nunn's production can't overcome the problems within the narrative, which is glazed with rose-tinted nostalgia and goes searching for answers towards the end.

Nineteen and naive, Alex (Michael Arden, superbly boyish and charming) falls for a French actress (Katherine Kingsley), whisking her off to his uncle George's countryside villa, only for her to become caught between conflicting affections. Eventually she marries George (Dave Willetts), who continues an affair with an Italian scuplturer, and their daughter - now 15 - fawns on the returned Alex. By the time Alex and the sculpturer have had their roll in the hay, ticking off amorous connections has overtaken the narrative thrust of David Garnett's original novella.

David Farley's design plays smartly on memory and art, giving the villa a sense of kiln-fired poterry and projected landscapes in a dreamy, watercolour haze, but his reliance on snapshots for scene-setting strips events of their specificity and mutes the intensity of the various passions.