L.O.V.E.

Reviews

The Guardian
L.O.V.E.
Cardiff

You would not expect the Shirley Bassey songbook to feature in a show from Volcano Theatre, Swansea's aggressively physical, nay violent, celebrants of conflict. But here she is, or at least some of her love songs, having done the now familiar post-modernist transition from straight to kitsch to joke to irony and back again to base, taken at face value at the end of one of the most harrowing pieces of theatre you are likely to see. To persuade us to take seriously a bit of Bassey schmaltz after a non-stop exposition of hair-raising violence and uninhibited bisexuality is quite something, and shows the confidence of this amazing company under the direction of DV8's Nigel Charnock.

L.O.V.E. is based on Shakespeare's sonnets, exploiting the sexual ambiguity, the lust, the jealousy and the passion in that remarkable collection. Volcano interpose themselves between text and audience, offering an interpretation and a commentary as the three performers fight one another, love one another and play each off against the other. From the tender to the obscene, from the erotic to the crude, the triangle stroke, kick and kiss and convince us that love hurts.

In a production that at present is perhaps a little bit too long and relies a bit too much on clichéd physicality, there are some electric moments: the repetition of the assertion that lust is "perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust", the words rhythmically chanted as they catch, swing and ritualistically attack one another; or the transformation of the Dark Lady into a Valerie Solanis figure as she literally cuts the clothes from one lover and draws the wicked-looking, evidently sharp knife all over the bodies of the two blindfolded men. Until you have seen Volcano you have not really seen dangerous theatre.

There is humour too, but not much, and some of it of the macabre kind - sharp knives are one thing, but here the collected works of William Shakespeare become a murder weapon.

David Adams


The Guardian
L.O.V.E.
Riverside Studios, Hammersmith

"My love is as a fever" is the opening line in Volcano Theatre's searing exploration of Shakespeare's sonnets, and it doesn't take long to see what they are driving at. Forget the eloquent sensuousness of Shakespeare's tortured vision of love: this is rough sex for the 1990s.

Under the athletic direction of DV8's Nigel Charnock, two men and a woman (Paul Davies, Liam Steel and Fern Smith) go through every permutation of lovemaking, physicalising the battle of the sexes with both wit and savagery. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" becomes a randy wrestling match, but there is gay sex in equal measure, taking its cue from the recurring line, "Thou lovely boy."

Either way, I found the spectacle curiously unerotic, but the courageous actors look as if they had fun putting it together. Charnock's choreography has a dazzling fluidity, laced with loads of masochistic danger. Probably the most striking moment is when Fern Smith produces a knife from a bunch of roses and threatens to castrate the men. Groin-squirming stuff, but definitely a treat for those who like their theatre fast and physical.

Kenneth Rea


The Guardian
L.O.V.E.
Colchester

A piece of theatre based on Shakespeare's sonnets, especially if caught somewhere like Essex University's Lakeside Theatre, might not seem likely to offer a harrowing, tragicomic, challenging experience such as you will rarely find anywhere. But then, the visiting Swansea-based Volcano Theatre is no ordinary group: they take a text, explore it, interpose themselves, hold it up and produce from it uniquely exciting, dangerous physical theatre.

Academics, of course, would know that the Sonnets are addressed to a young man and a Dark Lady and roughly trace the course of a triangular bisexual love affair. These poems, where familiar lines that launched a thousand books can momentarily give you a metaphorical clip round the ear, are about love, desire, sexuality, power, jealousy, guilt, shame, anguish. It is a familiar story, with a familiar ending, but on the way this remarkable company in L.O.V.E. relentlessly rip away the romance and expose the violence beneath the verse.

There are moments of tenderness, too, and some very funny scenes in Nigel Charnock's direction. And there are scenes, too, that make your toes curl. At the same time our notions of love and authenticity are questioned. L.O.V.E. begins and ends with a Shirley Bassey soundtrack, kitsch, melodramatically sung ballads that are perversely endowed with real feeling as meaningful as Shakespeare's poems. Even the Bard is subjected to post-modernism, it seems.

The Times
Kate Bassett enjoys a vigorous reworking of the themes of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Between the lines and the sheets
L.O.V.E.
Riverside Studios

Coleridge could be a periphrastic old prude: "I believe it is possible that a man may, under certain states of the moral feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male object - an affection beyond friendship and wholly aloof from appetite." He got a bit hot under the collar about the homosexuality of Shakespeare's sonnets. Volcano blows such embarrassed hesitancy sky high. Rushing at each other in their underwear, the Bard, the "lovely boy" and the "dark lady" of the sonnets (the tireless Paul Davies, Liam Steel and Fern Smith) body slam and grapple on the floor. A tangled threesome - each two-timing with the others according to this reading - they recite lines of verse whenever they can get a word in between tongue-wrestling and licking each other like there's no tomorrow. Aloof from appetite, my foot. They are flagrantly fit and, under the direction of Nigel Charnock of DV8, physicality naturally rises to the fore: this is not so much a play as dance with words.

What does L.O.V.E. stand for? Lashings Of Violent Exercise, perhaps. Shakespearean purists will almost certainly get their knickers in a twist. The poetry is given a rough ride. The sonnets are cut into pieces and Shakespeare's words are overwhelmed by the breathtaking acrobatics. Volcano's unidolatrous radical approach certainly has kick, but the production's bravura can degenerate into crassness. Shirley Bassey and Shakespeare are just not on a par. Lip-synching to the line "Something in the things he shows me" accompanied by crotch-rubbing really is bathetically superficial stuff and consequently sticks out between sonnets like a sore thumb. Far more inspired is the correlation between the aggressive drum-beat of electronic rock and the angry rhythms of sonnet 129 ("Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame"), or the counterpoint of harpsichord music versus frenzied activity: an echo of the sonnet's tension between form and turbulent content.

In places, it is hard to see how Shakespeare's words are suited to the cast's action. Elsewhere, however, the latter brings out new readings and, throughout, they potentially physicalise the sonnets' emotional undercurrents of violence and hurt. Having Shakespeare's lines shared between the three characters democratically and dramatically grants his lovers a right to reply. Still, the imposed storyline becomes increasingly spurious. The "dark lady" pulls a knife and threatens the men with frighteningly fundamental incisions and amputations. Shakespeare then finishes off his "lovely boy" by bashing him over the head with a book.

Nevertheless, albeit circuitously, Charnock's choreography does embody key qualities of the poems. Liam Steel flicks from levity to intense sincerity. Paul Davies ricochets between passion and loathing; and Fern Smith, pulling her knife from a bunch of roses, actually symbolises the duplicitous nature of sonnets where lacerating irony lurks under doting sweetness. The cast's utter liberation, exuberance and stamina makes up for self-indulgence. All the same, L.O.V.E. would benefit from sharp pruning

Kate Bassett.

Plays and Players
L.O.V.E.
Green Room, Manchester

It's a belief held by some scholars that Shakespeare's sonnets were less the febrile outpourings of a heart overwhelmed by love than a dispassionate exercise in poetical form. Swansea-based Volcano, already the bearers of a formidable reputation with their reworkings of Berkoff and Harrison, have sifted through more than fifty of them to produce a tough, dazzling piece of physical theatre, saturated with the passion - and the poison - of these sexually ambivalent love poems.

Paul Davies, Fern Smith and Liam Steel enact a ménage à trois in which every sonnet alternates as a declaration of love and war. Against a soundtrack of Shirley Bassey and thrash metal, a narrative of sorts is created in which the object of the others' desire is wooed, won, fought over, torn apart and finally pummelled to death by his ravenous paramours.

Nigel Charnock (of dance group DV8) makes his presence felt as a director with some ingenious and astonishing choreography, but the explosive energy and quirky humour are all Volcano's own. Three chairs and a bed, beautifully and sensuously lit, are all the three-strong cast need, and, of course, an audience. Volcano always take their style well beyond the confrontational, and the first ten minutes has them trawling their way through the auditorium, seducing uneasy spectators with intimately-delivered snatches of sonnet. Alarming stuff, but not nearly so alarming as Fern Smith spurned as she produces a knife from a bunch of roses and performs some decidedly inimitable acts upon Davies's and Steel's semi-naked bodies.

Volcano are fast becoming one of the most audacious and exhilarating young companies around and this stunning show does nothing to halt the process.

Jim Burke