EDINBURGH 2023: Review: ACTUALLY, LOVE, Pleasance Courtyard (The Green)
A funny and touching rom-com inspired play!
Following the success of Don’t Say MacBeth! and Sex with Friends, GOYA Theatre returns to Edinburgh Fringe with the music theatre piece Actually, Love. A funny, touching two-hander that interrogates how art and identity intersect, it will definitely make you laugh and may even make you cry.
Alex (Sam Woof) is trying to write a successful love song before their upcoming gig. Stevie (Jacob Broatch) is aiming to get the lead role in a new romantic comedy film. When they hire the same practice room, they meet for the first time in years. With old tensions simmering, will they get a rom-com story of their own?
Written by Sam Woof and directed by Tomas Howells, the show is well structured. When Stevie asks Alex to help them practise for the film audition, they improvise the plot of the film together. This technique enables the characters to take on other personas, with lots of potential for comedy and for getting at truths that might not have been said otherwise. Songs are used sparingly but each one is well placed within the plot and sung beautifully. Ably performed by Woof and Broatch, Alex and Stevie feel grounded and believable.
Pulling on all the rom-com tropes that audiences recognise, the show finds humour in sending them up. The heteronormative nature of straight rom-coms are deconstructed in a narrative that also analyses why audiences are drawn to these stories. It explores the impact on queer people of a genre that reduces the character most like you to a stereotypical ‘gay best friend’, asking how one should exist as a queer artist with a politicised identity, and where the lines of compromise are.
Witty and funny, with an affecting ending, this show is an hour well spent. For a comedy with romance that centres queer characters, get yourself to Actually, Love at the Pleasance Courtyard this Fringe!
Actually, Love runs at Pleasance Courtyard (The Green), at 15.45 (1 hour) 14-17 Aug (not 16, 22) Age 14+
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