Another day, another excellent preview of a short play at the Orange Tree Theatre.
We saw Black Mountain the previous night – click here or below for that one:
Black Mountain by Brad Birch, Orange Tree Theatre, 26 January 2018
Out Of Love is the same cast, same creatives, but a different play in this rep season.
The acting was once again excellent. The set was the same – no props; just light and soundscape.
Here is a link to the Orange Tree resource for this play.
Janie and I had different views on the relative merits of the two pieces. Janie preferred this one, finding the tender emotional elements of it more gripping than the psychological thriller.
I was a little surprised that Janie warmed so much to this piece – she is usually very resistant to plays that leap backwards and forwards in time, complaining that they mess with her ability to follow the narrative line. She felt that the way the actors deployed their bodies and their voices made it very clear, most of the time, whether they were children, youngsters or adults.
I’m usually fine with temporal gymnastics, but this play had even me a bit confused right at the end, when the two female characters suddenly acquired names we’d never heard before and pregnancies…
…I heard several people wondering about that as we left the theatre…
…but about 15 minutes later, while washing my hands at Don Fernando before dinner, I worked out that the pregnant duo in the final scene must have been the mothers of the two female protagonists just before the main pair were born.
Below I have embedded the trailer:
Here is a link to a term that should pick up all the reviews – at the time of writing just reviews from previous venues as this piece is still in preview at the Orange Tree.
Going by the reviews, Janie is right and I am wrong – Out of Love seems to have gone down better on the whole with the reviewers.