Theatre review: Love and Other Acts of Violence

The Donald and Margot Warehouse only now reopens its venue, having used lockdown as an opportunity to do another refurbishment of the building, in part to improve accessibility. While the finishing touches were put on they of course had their summer West End residency with four versions of Constellations, and in the first new show back in Seven Dials director Elayce Ismail often nods to Michael Longhurst's now-famous staging, with a couple meeting and falling in love on a fairly bare stage, the lights flashing on and off quickly to take us from one scene to the next. But Love and Other Acts of Violence is a new play by Cordelia Lynn, a writer with a history of presenting us with horrors under a deceptively smiley face, and her couple inhabit only one reality, that's going to take them to some dark places. The unnamed couple first meet as graduate students: Tom Mothersdale's Him is an aspiring writer and enthusiastic political activist; Abigail Weinstock's Her is a gifted physicist.

He's the son of a Polish cleaner, she's descended from Jews who fled the Pogroms, and while she changed her name to something less Jewish-sounding and does speak about always having a flight instinct somewhere in the back of her mind, she never quite agrees with his warnings and protests about the direction the country is heading in.

The first couple of scenes setting up their first meetings are fun, although in amongst the charm Him raises a few Richard Curtis red flags around just plugging ahead with a woman who's not interested in him. Mothersdale is an underrated actor who seems equally able to play vulnerable charm and absolute monsters, and Love and Other Acts of Violence gives him a chance to flex a bit of both. Her is a bit more of a reactive role but in her professional debut Weinstock holds up well opposite Mothersdale, occasionally giving the character a glint of slightly ethereal oddity that may not stand her in good stead when things start to get nasty*.

Which they do, in small but relentlessly incremental steps, as the infractions on freedom Him is protesting against get bigger and more blatant. She insists the laws of physics aren't up for debate, he says politics trumps science, and his mansplaining is proven correct a few years down the line, when she's a lecturer and researcher at the same university: The government tells the science department they don't have to start teaching eugenics, but it might help if they want to still have a budget next term. With her religion and his political activism it's not long before they both find themselves on "the list," and are not only in danger but responding to it in violent ways.

Until now this has been an expressionistic production both in performance and design, but in the last twenty minutes the huge box that's been looming ominously over Basia Bińkowska's set lowers to reveal a naturalistic flashback to early 20th century Poland, with the actors playing their characters' ancestors, and joined by Richard Katz as Her great-grandfather. It's a brutally well-done scene but its only purpose seems to be to highlight both the cyclical nature of history and the historical link between the characters - both things that I thought the main narrative had established pretty well. So that remains the main success story here, albeit not an easy or comforting watch, either in its depiction of openly creeping fascism (the characters' realisation that they can't assume the police are there to protect them is particularly topical) or in its titular depiction of how love can be genuine but at the same time destructive. Unfortunately its late experiment with form is one that doesn't pay off as well.

Love and Other Acts of Violence by Cordelia Lynn is booking until the 27th of November at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

*The actors also had to contend tonight with a false fire alarm interrupting the show, and managed to get back into the swing of the play quickly once they could resume