Lovesong
Gate Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Midway through Lovesong, Abi Morgan’s absorbing play, an irritated man takes a dig at his wife. The young couple, relocated to a new country in the 1960s, are at a street party. She suspects he’s been flirting with another woman. He accuses her of being a killjoy: “When did you get old?”
It’s a typical insult you might hear from twentysomethings who view themselves as carefree and cool compared with older people ground down by complications. If that’s true, his wife has an extremely good explanation: “When I married you.”
The irony of the comments isn’t lost on the audience. The conceit of Morgan’s play is to allow us to also see the couple in their 60s. In one scene young Margaret and William – the excellently paired Zara Devlin and Naoise Dunbar – are inspecting their new house, noticing the starlings that visit their garden.
Next we cut to an older version of him dropping a dead bird on the kitchen table: “The cat got another one.” (To keep things simple, Morgan names the older iterations Maggie and Billy, as a sign of their deepened familiarity with one another.)
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While the young husband and wife are first presented as giddy companions with new adventures before them, an ill Maggie is seen busying around the house, irritated by her husband’s helpfulness. A good-natured Billy, played by Nick Dunning with endless charm, ribs his wife with reminders of their friskier days. Maggie is hilariously blunt; watch how ice-cold Ingrid Craigie turns when Billy gives her an iPod.
Directed by the choreographer David Bolger, the production occasionally cedes to movement. William runs away with Margaret’s shoes, for example, and does forward rolls on the table.
More surprising is when past and present seem to collide: Billie catches Margaret’s head peeping out of their wardrobe, asking about an outfit; Maggie sees William tumble out of their fridge, leaping on to the kitchen table. (Someone later points out that starlings are great mimics, suggesting the birds surrounding the house may be voicing past events.)
There is a lightness of touch as the play charts the unexpected detours of the couple’s marriage. (“She’s due a baby,” Margaret says, relaying news about a friend, as Devlin’s vocal cords sound strangled.) Movement and design don’t so much paper over the cracks; Morgan’s play is actually quite frictionless.
Yet there’s something plausible despite how inconsequential these revelations are to the plot. Whether in seeing a wife reluctantly grin at a husband lying about their financial future or a forgiving man embrace his spouse after a betrayal, marriage seems to be about rolling with the punches.
Morgan’s play is more about getting to the end. In that sense it’s reminiscent of the line in Happy Days, Samuel Beckett’s authoritative play about long-term relationships, when a wife in a bitter marriage asks her grunting husband, “Is it not so, Willie, that even words fail, at times?”
“Promise me,” Margaret says, “we won’t become one of those married couples facing one another over a cooling cup of coffee with nothing left to say.” William shrugs: “Perhaps they said everything.”
Lovesong is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Sunday, June 15th
