Love, Love, Love

Description

1967. Kenneth and Sandra know the world is changing. And they want some of it. Love, Love, Love takes on the baby boomer generation as it retires, and finds it full of trouble. Smoking, drinking, affectionate and paranoid, one couple journeys forty-years from initial burst to full bloom. The play follows their idealistic teenage years in the 1960s to their stint as a married family unit before finally divorced and, although disintegrated, free from acrimony. Their children, on the other hand, bitterly rail against their parents' irresponsibility and their relaxed, laissez-faire attitude. This play by Olivier award-winning writer Mike Bartlett questions whether the baby boomer generation is to blame for the debt-ridden and adrift generation of their children, now adults but far from stable and settled.

Hailed by Stage as 'one of the most exciting new talents to emerge in recent times', Mike has worked with various theatres since graduating including Paines Plough, the Royal Court, Soho and Hampstead. He is a winner of the Old Vic New Voices Award and is currently participating in the prestigious Pearson Playwrights Scheme. His plays include Cock (Royal Court), Artefacts (Bush Theatre) and Earthquakes in London (Headlong/National Theatre).

Did the baby boomers change the world? Or did they just grab whatever they could before leaving the next generation a life of tuition fees, debt and unaffordable housing? Having tackled environmental ruin in the decades-spanning Earthquakes in London earlier this year, the playwright Mike Bartlett is back hunting big game. * Dominic Maxwell, The Times, 14.10.10 * this three-act play for the theatre company Paines Plough boasts terrific dialogue and acute observations as it takes its protagonists from falling in love in 1967 to suburban squabbles in 1990 to retirement in 2011. * Dominic Maxwell, The Times, 14.10.10 * Barlett has been showing us how love love love has always depended upon money money money, that love without responsibility can just be narcissism. * Dominic Maxwell, The Times, 14.10.10 * Mike Bartlett's bang-on-the-money new play * Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph, 14.10.10 * Bartlett doesn't just have an acute ear for the way things were, but how youth then hoped things might be, and the scene is rich with a sense of newly discovered female emancipation and budding mischief. * Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph, 14.10.10 * Bartlett does the clash of generational world views with a devastating precision * Elisabeth Mahoney, Guardian, 14.10.10 * Bartlett raises the big issue of Britain's over-inflated property market * Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, 17.10.10 * Olivier award-winning playwright Mike Bartlett may have structured his latest play (jointly produced by Paines Plough and Plymouth's Drum Theatre) as an old-fashioned, three-act, two-interval drama but there is nothing stuffy about this acid-sharp story of a couple who wanted to change the world but cannot change themselves.' * Clare Brennan, Observer, 31.10.10 * enormously accomplished playwright, Mike Bartlett, loves experimenting with form * Georgina Brown, Mail on Sunday, 31.10.10 * Love, Love, Love deliberately echoes the structure of an old-fashioned, Rattigan-esque play, in three acts * Georgina Brown, Mail on Sunday, 31.10.10 *