A two man show by charismatic performers Aideen Wylde and Tadhg Hickey promises fast paced farce within the context of an 1870’s period setting, interestingly established at the start by handing out a ‘local paper’ to the audience as they enter, and an impressive ‘lawn’ assembled onstage. However, despite the considerable energy of the performers, the play doesn’t have the clarity and cumulative effect of a farce; the hour and five minutes we end up seeing is a confused comic mishmash that never seems to be sure what it is.
The play’s most striking oddity is its reliance for many of the jokes on meta conceits, where the two actors break from the frame and argue about the validity of their attempts to set the scene in a distant past. Rather than adding to the plot, this just makes it seem more and more fragmented and unsure in terms of tone. Attempts to give the story of Vere St. Ledger Goold’s descent from Irish tennis star to a penniless shambles a sense of pace only serve to make things seem rushed and unexplained. Equally, the actors break out of the frame so regularly that it prevents our ability to engage with the characters, which damages the play because so much of the humour is character-based. The actors move with skill between multiple characters, but seem uncertain about whether to play them in a caricatured, deliberately slapstick way, or to actually make us invest in them as real people. As a result, it is never clear whether we ought to be laughing at the silliness of the plot, at the actors the breaking apart of the plot, or in sympathy with the characters.
When key plot points are interrupted by Hickey arguing with the soundman, and a party scene is soundtracked by flashing lighting and a burst of Prodigy’s ‘Smack my Bitch up’, the effect is one of a heap of supposedly ‘surreal’ elements packed into a thin, fluffy story that isn’t given the opportunity to develop. Rather than providing us with choreographed, structured chaos, Love All unfortunately emerges as just a bit of a mess.
