Love is in the Angst
Ben Brantley reviews the London theater’s summer of love.
When lovers meet on London’s stages this summer, the odds are it’s not violins they’re hearing. It’s alarm bells.
Consider the strange, sad case of the Norwegian minister and the freethinking new woman, natural soul mates who find each other, only to destroy each other. Or the kindhearted Chinese prostitute whose affair with a pilot drives him to heroin addiction. Or the middle-class man and woman who consign themselves to lives of loneliness with the wrong people because that is what good people do. And that’s not to mention the passion-addled barrister’s wife, who, having left her husband for a younger man, is first seen trying to gas herself to death.
These typically tabloidish tales, which I’ve seen enacted quite compellingly during the past 10 days, were written by Ibsen, Brecht, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. And the new work I’ve sampled — including Anthony Weigh’s “2,000 Feet Away,” a symbol-heavy play at the Bush Theater about pedophilia in the American heartlands, starring Joseph Fiennes — suggests that the contemporary outlook for romance is, if anything, less rosy. If one pattern has emerged from my theatergoing here, it’s that the course of true love runs straight off a cliff.
