‘Love Love Love’ is Mike Bartlett’s acclaimed new family drama spans four decades. Baby boomer Rina Vergano talks to the playwright ’bout her generation.

The world premiere production of ‘Love, Love, Love’ visits The Ustinov next week, in the wake of national five-star reviews – “bang-on-the-money, required viewing” (Daily Telegraph); “peppered with terrific lines and big laughs” (The Guardian). Mike Bartlett’s new play takes on the baby boomer generation as it retires, and finds it full of trouble. Smoking, drinking and, by turns, affectionate and paranoid, one couple’s journey is charted from rebellious teenagers in 1967 to dealing with their own cash-strapped offspring 40 years later.

Bartlett is a ground-breaking, prolific – and at 30, still young – playwright, whose play ‘Cock’ won an Olivier award earlier this year, selling out at the Royal Court before it had even opened. He also won the Old Vic New Voices award for ‘Artefacts’, a trio of prizes for ‘Not Talking’, and his latest play ‘Earthquakes In London’ just finished a run at the National. Some track record, then. Being part of the post-war baby crop myself (1953, if you must ask), I’m curious to hear his take on things.

Mike, do you think the ‘Me Generation’ is capable of growing up, or just growing old? And is ‘LLL’ a tribute to them or a kind of frustration at them... or both? “Absolutely both. It’s impossible to sum up a generation in a play, and that’s not the aim. But we have two main characters, Kenneth and Sandra, who meet when they’re brilliant, young and idealistic. They have fun, they make mistakes, they’re perhaps not the ideal parents but they absolutely love their children. The play suggests that by now something seems to have gone wrong, and asks why. It poses the contradiction: how can you be true to the 60s ethos if you have a job, pension and have become the establishment yourself? I think a lot of the political changes of the 60s, although they were triggered through collective action, are really to do with individual freedoms. Sexuality, gender and race freedoms were the main positive outcomes of that time, and they were massive and important. But I think what happened underneath all of that was the death of socialism, and the loss of faith in any kind of political ideology as a concept. That inevitably lead to a great focus on the individual, as that is all that is left.”

What was your impulse for writing it? “As I grew up, I was absolutely told that the 60s were astonishing and we would never have those times again, in terms of politics, culture, art, music, and that’s a difficult thing to rebel against. I think every generation is told they are a disappointment to their parents, but the difference here is that the parents now seem more radical and liberal than their children. It seemed exciting to write a play that set the two age groups off against each other, and it’s been wonderful to see that happen in the audience, with different people laughing at different points and judging characters’ actions entirely differently.”

The Guardian review said that ‘LLL’ was “fuelled by drinking that makes ‘Mad Men’ look like a bunch of lightweights…” Mike: “I think drugs and alcohol are normally symptoms rather than causes of things. How much of the 60s’ behaviour, if it were done now, would be classed as ‘anti-social’? I think it’s astonishing how little we talk about the strict authoritarian nature of these new phrases. Sometimes the last years of New Labour and certainly this current government can sound like something from the 50s. Maybe the next generation – the teenagers around now – will have a revolution of their own?”

This production looks gilt-edged, with a cast of seasoned actors in Daniella Denby-Ashe, James Barrett, John Heffernan and Simon Darwen, along with new-comer Rosie Wyatt, whose one-woman show won a Fringe First at Edinburgh this year. Add in direction by James Grieve (AD of the excellent Paines Plough) and… what’s not to love?

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE IS AT THEATRE ROYAL BATH: THE USTINOV FROM TUE 9-SAT 20 NOV. SEE REVIEW HERE.
 

Copyright Rina Vergano 2010

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