The Love Project - Underbelly, Edinburgh

This review was first published on The Public Reviews.

If your favourite bits of the film When Harry met Sally are those gorgeous idiosyncratic scenes when the old couples reminisce about how they met, then you will thoroughly enjoy The Love Project, a charming verbatim play about love.
A collaboration between new company Every day, founded by director Ellie Browning, and Look Left Look Right, who have developed a reputation for high quality documentary theatre and everyday stories.

Skilfully acted by all cast members (particularly Natasha Pring and Michael Cusick), Browning and Michaels have edited together a sweetly amiable sitting room version of love. This love is not concerned with the grandiose, but the minutiae, love that takes place on sofas through the finishing of each other’s sentences. Efforts had clearly been made to provide a range of voices; the old and young, different ethnicities and sexual orientation, but the best sections involved the couples. In verbatim plays, with their ability to provide verbal accuracy, it is how we speak, our in-eloquence, which speaks the loudest. The tangents and sentences that begin before others have finished are so hard for playwrights, with their expert grasp of grammar, to recreate. Amy and Andy, whose different variations of complimentary laughter, spoke volumes and Myles, whose downplays his story of a death-defying romantic gesture with ‘I’ll be scarred for life but that’s fine, isn’t it.’ captured the English tendency for bathos perfectly. This love, just like the play, won’t change the world, but it sure makes it a better place.

http://www.thepublicreviews.com/the-love-project-underbelly-edinburgh/