Review: Lovesong, Frantic Assembly

Written for Culture Wars

Lovesong is an intricate, nuanced essay that’s been smudged into illegibility by tears. While it glances off a wealth of complex and ambiguous ideas, none of them really take hold because ultimately, Frantic Assembly and writer Abi Morgan ultimately want to smack a lump in your throat and poke you in the tear ducts. What a crying shame.

In fairness, it’s devastatingly effective. But then Lovesong’s central formula is one of sure-fire sentimentality: an elderly couple, William and Margaret, consumed by memories of their younger selves.

Basically, William and Margaret are both abstract and particular. They stand for themselves and for any old old couple. It is the latter that, when contrasted with their younger selves, makes them sentimental. The combination of faded youth and missed potential is inevitably poignant. With its encroaching ends, physical restrictions and hopelessness – by which I mean it’s lack of a real future tense - old age always is.

That Lovesong is so determined to make you feel a certain way makes you push against its manipulation and mawkishness. Simulataneously, in weeping for them as abstracts – and we do, because as abstracts they stand for all of us; we are weeping for nothing less than our own inevitable demise – we lose sight of their particularities, which are drowned out by emotion. William and Margaret are infinitely more interesting as particulars than as hangers for latte-philosophy about life’s transience.

Of course, it’s impossible and unfair to put their respective contributions through a process of fractional distillation, but generally, Frantic Assembly treat them as abstracts and Morgan as particulars. Accompanied by sighing strings, the older couple dance with their younger partners, hopping into cradling arms and entwining their limbs in the characteristic – though never characterful – choreography that Frantic’s artistic directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett trot out time and again, varying only the pace and tone. Here its tender and mournful, and the reality of old and young dancing together is affecting, but really, what does it actually mean or matter?

Morgan, though her writing is infected by this tweeness, is onto more interesting specifics, in particular, the effect of childlessness. “They’ll come,” the thirty-year old William reassures his wife, “Children will come.” But they never do. Instead, the couple stop progressing through life. While it never splutters with a backfire, their relationship stalls. Life becomes an endless cycle through the seasons, marked by the starlings that circle overhead and the autumn leaves that litter the floor. Without children, William and Margaret are denied the developing shifts of parenthood that happen alongside one’s offspring.

Morgan’s deft skill is to neither rose-tint their relationship, nor demolish it with grayscale. Their love and fondness is plain to see and Siân Philips and Sam Cox manage to seem simultaneously content and incomplete. Sure, they still bicker and irritate one another by the simple fact of co-existence, but their shared silences are mostly comfortable and they tackle life’s little interruptions – dead birds and lost cats – together, clearly relying on one another.

However, all the promise of the past has waned. Life has passed William and Margaret by and they no longer have a future to care about in the way that they did at thirty, when newly married, recently emigrated and trying – hoping – for a child. Edward Bennett and Leanne Rowe are spritely and gooey, but take care to start the process of hollowing out which will lead to their drab future together.

By that point William and Margaret live only for one another. A cat, Biscuit, and a house are all that binds them together, and it’s not hard to understand why they opt for suicide and solitude respectively. Eventually, their teeth will be their only legacy.