This is a fine production of a brilliant script. First performed in 2005, Love by Patricia Cornelius presents a love triangle between Annie, Tanya and Lorenzo.
Annie is a sex worker. Tanya and Lorenzo live off her earnings and, in exchange, give her what she needs. They give her affection, and protection. The only thing Tanya and Lorenzo seem to have in common, apart from a desire for Annie, is the demand that she continues to work and bring in the cash. Between Annie’s two lovers, we’re tempted to trust Tanya more, but we don’t automatically assume she’s morally superior to Lorenzo – and that’s indicative of the wonderful richness of the script.
Cornelius has a wonderful ear for the vernacular. These down-and-out characters speak in the highly-modal, subtlety-free assertions, repetitions and retractions which are the linguistic province of society’s rejects. In particular, Lorenzo’s ethical statements display the binary certainty of one only too familiar with perpetual reprimand. Cornelius offers the poetry of the underclass, of the inarticulate, and in its unflinching truthfulness, these characters are granted the dignity we too often deny their real life counterparts.
Director Megan Sampson elicits admirable performances from the cast.
Izzy Williams as Annie is poignantly vulnerable and naive, but tempers these qualities with a hunger for life that enhances the pathos of her situation.
Georgia-Paige Theodos as Tanya powerfully evokes the toughness and isolation of a woman marginalised for being who she is.
Rhys Johnson as Lorenzo is gloriously high energy, part puppy, part crocodile.
We’re presented a nuanced psychological portrait of each character, and an evocation of the fraught world in which they inhabit. It’s one of brutality, sometimes unthinking, sometimes not. The characters show little awareness of wider sociological or political issues; their marginalisation is so complete that they seem almost incapable of viewing themselves as victims. Only rarely is the myopia of their narrow world transcended: once, in Lorenzo’s cruel taunting of Tanya that society has a place for him, but refuses one to her; and in the final moments of the play, when Annie tries to make sense of what they are, in imagery that’s as surprising as it is sad.
Paul Gilchrist
Love by Patricia Cornelius
presented by New Ghosts Theatre Company,
at the Old Fitz until 21 March
Image by Patrick Phillips
Theatre Red 