Review: JE L'AIME, London

Last year, Sophie Larsmon and Tristan Bernays helped cram the entire internet into a disused Murdoch paper warehouse in Deptford. Their latest collaboration shrinks the ambition to a north-west London flat and a marriage on the turn, and somehow still runs out of room.

Liv and Vic have just got the keys and are throwing a housewarming. In the space of a few years, the wannabe influencer and her tech-entrepreneur husband have gone from the UK to the US, spent six months in Provence and washed up back here, and tonight around 20 strangers are invited to toast their homecoming. A vat of beef bourguignon bubbles away in the kitchen, Alexa is on dinner-party-jams duty and the hosts work the room with drinks and nibbles for a good 20 minutes while the stragglers arrive. They look happy and settled. Give it another 45.

The pedigree is worth spelling out. Larsmon was creative director of Storehouse, the 2025 debut of Sage & Jester, a company bankrolled by the daughter of a Georgian billionaire. It was advertised on every spare wall in London, borrowed the voices of Toby Jones, Kathryn Hunter and Meera Syal, and was scripted by a writers’ room of six – Bernays among them. It failed on every front bar its design, and Larsmon has since conceded as much: she says it didn’t go to plan, and that millions of pounds and a huge design team are no guarantee of anything you’d be proud of. Perhaps chastened, she avoided naming Storehouse in a recent interview and, for Je l’aime, eschews the i-word altogether and calls it “intimate theatre” or “experiential”. Let us call it what it turns out to be.

Money has not exactly fled the scene. The executive producer and founder of Blue Fondue (Je l’aime is its debut production) is Ilma Tiki-Nausedaite, a tech entrepreneur who co-founded the email-marketing firm MailerLite, which was sold in 2022 to Vercom for around €84 million. Like the Georgian heiress before her, Tiki-Nausedaite is no pauper.

She is also the play’s source material. Lithuanian by birth, she grew up speaking Russian in the Soviet Union, picked up English and is now learning French, her fourth language. Onstage, Liv is a British woman taking French lessons, has invented an alter ego for class called Véronique, and is married to the founder of an AI startup. As disguises go, it is about as convincing as Clark Kent’s glasses.

Language is the richest seam. Liv and Vic converse in English, but he switches to Hindi when talking to his mother. When an argument flares up, all three languages fly across the living room before the pair end up screaming at each other in Esperanto (something that neither of them speaks before or after). A television in the corner translates the non-English passages, which is handy if you happen to notice it and are standing where you can see it clearly while following the action in the kitchen.

The script knows how familiar its ingredients are. Liv announces at one point that she feels like Madame Bovary, which is less a nod than a confession. Other debts go unacknowledged: a near-wordless five-minute stretch in which Vic cooks Liv some eggs strongly echoes the closing scene of Big Night (1996), where Stanley Tucci makes his brother an omelette in silence. Tucci did it better, and remembered the salt.

Bernays’ grasp of technology hasn’t improved since Storehouse, which asked us to believe the whole internet since time immemorial could be squeezed into a few rooms in SE8. Here Vic declares in his defence that, as a programmer, he thinks in ones and zeros. Speaking as a former professional code monkey, I can promise you this: no, we don’t.

The plotting fares no better. Vic reveals that they are relocating to the US in February, and Liv is distraught – she is sick of moving, she threw this party to put down roots, and couldn’t he have mentioned it before tonight? Minutes later she drops her own bombshell: she is off to France in January for three months of study. Why two people would choose a housewarming, with around 20 guests watching, to announce mutually exclusive life plans is anyone’s guess. Lights flicker and the doorbell rings, and neither leads anywhere. Then there’s the question of why Liv is cooking a beef dish to share with her Hindu husband. 

The direction wobbles early. The opening stretch, with the couple greeting guests at the door and chatting in character as they move among us, is loose and convincing. Then the easy banter hardens into lines that sound recited rather than spoken, followed by chewy lumps of exposition. Once the time jumps begin, “intimate theatre” has become plain old theatre in a living room.

The cast deserve better. Georgina Fairbanks arrives fresh from the West End’s longest-running play, where as Mollie Ralston in The Mousetrap she spent every evening welcoming a houseful of strangers – one of them a murderer – to a snowbound guest house. Here the guests are harmless; the danger is all in the script. Sushant Shekhar, who has already been cast as the lead in upcoming film My Indian Boyfriend: The Golden Mile, matches her. Both are good company and at their most natural in that unscripted-feeling opening; both are left stranded whenever the writing reaches for profundity. Individually, it’s hard to fault either of them. Together, they are let down by a script that never decides what their marriage is actually about.

There is a story with heart in here, and a handful of cute moments. Even at this length, there is enough to grab onto. But this is a long way from the finished article for a show that was tried out as a work-in-progress in April, then rewritten (by Larsmon’s estimate, around 70 per cent of it) over three or four drafts. The tang is unmistakable: like Storehouse, it feels like a vanity project in search of a reason to exist.

Its finest image is the pair yelling at each other in Esperanto: a language that, like Je l’aime, had grand ambitions yet to be fulfilled.

Je l’aime continues at secret London locations until 14 November