Review: Labour’s Love Lost, Lion and Unicorn Theatre

Review: Labour’s Love Lost, Lion and Unicorn Theatre

At the beginning of Labour’s Lost Love co-deviser Rebeka Dio sings a song with a great deal of foreshadowing and meta commentary that is gently amusing. It covers a number of ideas, including ‘avant-garde is hard’, and I doubt many would disagree, as creating something that is cutting edge with a sense of anarchy is incredibly difficult to pull off effectively.

Yet oddly this is ‘avant-Garde for beginners’, and while it touches upon a lot of subjects it does so very glibly; it flitters around those topics, but there’s no depth to it at all. And this is quite surprising as the previous play which Dio helped create, Places I Never Think About at Applecart Arts, was a much more complex, impressive affair that examined unusual folklore using puppetry, music, dance, poetry and song.

Yet apart from a couple of songs this is a very conventional work, at least as far as slightly absurdist theatre goes. After the opening number Dio leaves the stage and we meet Goda Liutkute‘s lead character, who works (and excels) at a charity, and who is trying to go glamping; but it’s immediately clear that she’s unable to relax. And then the point is hammered home time and again, as the audience are repeatedly told this, and her frustration grows as she can’t go online or find any shelter.

As she wanders through a forest she meets a number of embodiments of nature, all played by Dio, including a bee, a frog, a heron and mould. Dio’s performances are often meant to be deliberately silly but, when matched with clichéd and surface level observations, instead of being whimsical it’s a little dull.

Liutkute turns in a strong performance and her character does a lot of the heavy lifting in keeping the play at least somewhat watchable, but even she is unable to prevent it from feeling lightweight. It stumbles around a number of questions about how humanity acts, about consent, ego, our addiction to technology, the simplicity and complexity of nature, love and those who haven’t experienced it, but it rarely says anything interesting about them.

Oddly this is an incredibly short production as well. With a supposed running time of sixty minutes I found myself hoping that the third act might deliver on some of the promise shown – that it would lead to a thoughtful or insightful denouement. But Dio ends on a very short song, disappears off stage, and at only just over forty minutes the play shudders to a halt.

This isn’t advertised as a work in progress, and tickets aren’t inexpensive, so it is bizarre that both performers are on stage for such a short time. It’s an initially ambitious play but one which is flippant, with the conclusions made almost strangely simple. It’s a victim of ‘show, not tell’ throughout, as everything is spelled out for the audience, and the lack of a third of the running time is both frustrating and perplexing.

Devised by: Rebeka Dio and Goda Liutkute
Written by The Company
Designed by: Irina Anghel
Directed by Yuval Brigg
Produced by: Nomadomedy

Labour’s Love Lost plays at Lion and Unicorn Theatre until 4 May. Further information and bookings can be found here.