Love And Other Acts Of Violence – Donmar Warehouse, London

A review of Love and Other Acts of Violence, a new play by Cordelia Lynn on now at the Donmar Warehouse. Directed by Elayce Ismail, and starring Tom Mothersdale and Abigail Weinstock in the leading roles.

Love And Other Acts Of Violence

I wanted to like this play. Really, I did. After Blindness last year and Inua Ellams’ Search Party recently, I was excited to see the first full-length play back at the Donmar Warehouse. And the premise (from the Donmar website) is interesting: “A young Jewish physicist and an activist poet meet at a party and fall in love. As society splinters around them, the couple’s struggle to survive erupts into violence.”

However… I did not like this play. I struggled with whether it is just not a play that is to my taste, or whether it was this production of it. It was maybe a bit of both. My issues with the play were threefold. Firstly, it is a play of two halves, but these halves are not very even either in length or in tone. When it changed, I expected this to be as a kind of short epilogue. But there was still a reasonable amount of plot to go, so for me it lost its pace. Secondly I thought it was a bit heavy handed. I mean sure, things aren’t going that great in the world right now. But this vision seemed relentlessly bleak. Even if it ends up being true, I don’t want to expose myself to more of that world than I need to.

And thirdly and perhaps most importantly for my enjoyment of this new work, the characters are not sympathetic. The play opens with the male character mansplaining and disrespecting the female character’s boundaries, so as a love story it lost me there and then. Could the right combination of actor and director coax something else out of the character? I just don’t know. Abigail Weinstock as the female character had more depth, but with the male character I was left scratching my head. Who was he, apart from an angry intellectual activist?

So in summary maybe it was the play that just wasn’t for me.

So What Did I Like, Then?

Were there any positives that made up for my challenges with the play generally? Well, partly. For me the best part of Love and Other Acts of Violence was the set design by Basia Bińkowska. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s very innovative and impressive. She has adapted the set perfectly to the nature of the play and its two contrasting sections. And during the first part, it encapsulated playwright Cordelia Lynn’s vision of a bleak future. But it’s mainly about the big reveal, just wait for it!

I was hoping to think of some other positives while I wrote this section, but they haven’t come to mind. Here is perhaps an easy suggestion for improvement, though. One of the reasons that I didn’t really connect with the characters is that the scenes were badly blocked. In far too many scenes the actors stood facing each other along the same axis. From my seat this angle meant I was looking at best at the back of a head, at worst trying to look around the back of a head to see the other actor at all.

I hope that maybe this is revised a little during the play’s run – I saw it quite early on. If I had sat in a different seat maybe I would have experienced the play differently, but it shouldn’t come down to such details. But that’s ok, you can’t win them all. I will be back at the Donmar at the next opportunity to see what else they have in store!

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 2/5

Love and Other Acts of Violence on until 27 November 2021

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