Love and Other Acts of Violence

by Cordelia Lynn

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 28 October 2021

Elayce Ismail directs Tom Mothersdale and Abigail Weinstock in a new play by Cordelia Lynn, designed by Basia Bińkowska and lit by Joshua Pharo, the first production in the theatre since the renovation works which were fortuitously undertaken during the enforced closures of the recent lockdowns.

Love and Other Acts of Violence charts a stormy relationship between an unnamed man and woman, he a poet and she a physicist, who meet at a party, become partners, split for a while after a searing quarrel, and get together again. Their first encounter is unpromising, the man allowing the general noise of the party to excuse his overbearing encroachment on the woman's space and to amplify a typically masculine penchant for over-explaining things. The woman is poised and reserved, ironically amused, but eventually tired of the presumption. Even so, a casual hook-up develops into a more long-lasting liaison.

The tortuous misunderstandings between two adults with strong senses of their own independence form a frutiful subject for many modern plays, but the familiar tensions are given an added twist of urgency here by an uneasy sense that the society in which these two people live (presumably our society) is shifting away from comfortable certainties about personal and intellectual freedom towards something more sinister. The man has always been an activist; his insistent 'mansplaining' at the beginning is full of political jargon and well-worn catchphrases. It takes far longer - perhaps too long - for the woman, coccooned in a university research lab, to realise that his analysis has been broadly correct. She recounts a chilling discussion with her head of department that seems at first sight just a bureaucratic absurdity, but which carries unmistakably totalitarian overtones.

Simmering underneath is a minefield set by historical events the two are poorly aware of. In a purely accidental way the two discover that their forebears hailed from a city with a dark and contentious past, a city with differing names depending on one's viewpoint: Lemburg, Lviv or Lwow. She, from a Jewish background, is uneasily aware of the ramifications. He, of Polish extraction, idly wonders whether their ancestors might have known one another, but she says decisively that it would be better if they had not.

The increasing threat of the contemporary situation is linked in an unexpected epilogue with a glimpse at the disaster that befell her family in the pogrom of 1919. Until this point the entire play had been performed on a bare wooden stage surrounded by gravel and ash, with an equally featureless wooden ceiling suspended above. This ceiling is winched down to reveal a domestic interior in which a terrified young woman attempts to warn her father (Richard Katz) of the approaching Polish troops while he reminisces about the stability of life in the shtetl the family abandoned a generation before; only she survives while a confused Polish man grapples with the horror he has helped to inflict on her family. It is an unusual insight to imagine that the casually anti-semitic young man might be as traumatised by events as the obvious victim. The young peole here are clearly the ancestors of the man and woman in the present.

Abigail Weinstock and Tom Mothersdale chart the rocky relationship with skill, dependent entirely on the text since the play is uncluttered by scenery or props until the epilogue. The markers of the wider situation are presented unfussily, and therefore do not seem at all heavy-handed, allowing for the the all-too-common turbulences of a contemporary relationship to become fraught with historical resonances even as the characters remain largely oblivious of them. The woman admits to an overpowering fear of bearing children, beyond anything the man can imagine, but it is left to us to draw conclusions about why she should feel this way.

The newspaper reviews I have read find the ambition of the play laudable but the structure a disappointment. Clearly, however, the playwright did not intend to write just another romantic comedy, or just another variation of Constellations, and I found the play powerful partly because it delibertely pulled back from the intensely personal to explore the wider picture.