Love, Love, Love at Lyric Hammersmith review: A witty, acerbic rumination on the generation gap
There’s a theory that, no matter how leftie and woke we might be in our youth, we all become Tories in the end. But how do we get there?
That’s the journey we’re taken on in Love, Love, Love, Mike Bartlett’s three-act drama which picks up with a couple, Kenneth and Sandra, in 1967, 1990 and 2011.
They start off as a pair of pot-smoking students in swinging London, divert via a rather nice house in Reading to bring up their children, and end up as divorced Daily Mail readers, guarding their pension pots like animals guard their young.
Its observations are both witty and painfully realistic – Rachael Stirling’s hypocritical, wine-soaked Sandra hits all the right notes, and the glee among the millennials in the room is palpable in the final act when the couple’s daughter, Rose, screams at her parents to buy her a house.
Essential viewing for those on both sides of the generation gap.