Bye Bye Love

Sarah Gordon is not a new playwright to the Barn, and this production showed her awareness of the Barn’s limitations and also its potential. Using a minimal set and symbolic rather than naturalistic staging, 'Bye Bye Love' presents the decaying marriage of George (Dan Wood) and Julia (Laura Horton).

George is the browbeaten husband who struggles to sell his “retro” art (which, oddly, depicts birds with angel wings). The trope of his awful artwork reappears throughout the play, providing scenes of light humour, particularly when Julia stabs one of his canvases with a knitting needle she borrows from George’s aunt, Annie Sylvester (Veronica Hare). Julia is presented as the career woman, the character who clearly wears the metaphorical trousers in all aspects of their domestic life: keeping in contact with the children at university, the household chores and bringing home the bacon.

Horton’s aggrieved wife was excellently portrayed, consolidating her reputation as a strong performer in a variety of roles. The action in the play is slow-paced at times due to long sequences with no dialogue, which are supported by the playing of a film projected against the white sheet backdrop. This film is in the style of a home video created by the characters, and the romantic shots of the two actors clasping each other on a windswept beach provided a poignant contrast to the disintegrating relationship we saw on the stage in front of us. Gordon’s writing is heavy-handed at times, using unnecessarily poetic description that sits uncomfortably with her fast-paced, articulate and incisive dialogue at the play’s beginning. The interactive theatre style opening, where the actors ushered the audience in, speaking with them and pointing to them where to sit, was a decision not followed through in the rest of the play, as the script resumed a more naturalistic approach. Gordon juxtaposes the thought processes of the two lovers as they both sat on stage penning a letter to each other, using split screen dialogue to map the different emotional journeys on which each of the characters go.

The place of Annie Sylvester (Veronica Hare) in all of this seemed a bit hastily added, as she is seemingly not a central feature of the plot. As the character that linked the two parts of the double bill together though, Hare conveys the youthful exuberance of a young girl in 'Ta-ra Love' alongside the more mature, grieving old woman in 'Bye Bye Love' competently and believably. Her character is the catalyst for Julia’s decision to leave her husband: upon seeing the extent of Annie’s grief, Julia realises that she would not feel the same if she lost George, “as awful as that sounds”. A compelling narrative in its own right, I feel that this play did not necessarily need to be part of a double bill. Certain features of the set, such as the sand left over from the previous play, were incongruous in the context of the story. As the audience were seated on the floor, on cushions and mats that soon ended up coated in sand, different choices in terms of staging could have been made to allow the audience a more comfortable and less gritty experience. However, this play was polished and assured, and heralds great things for the progress of new student writing in the Drama Barn.

Review for the first part of this week's double bill here

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