Love Child is the story of two women - a mother and daughter - who have never met; the former gave the latter away at her birth, the daughter returns to seek out her lost parent. So far so good, and the construction of the play manages to prevent what is essentially one long conversation from getting boring, interestingly book-ending it with monologues, first by the daughter, and later by the mother.
The Australian two-hander is exceptionally well-written, tangling and untangling plot lines stylishly and with considerable attention to detail. Similarly, the language used in the writing crosses boundaries, successfully taking wild metaphors and images and inserting them into day-to-day conversation, making you question why you don’t speak like that all the time, rather than alienating its audience. Where it falls down is in its altogether quite stunted twist towards the end that appears out of nowhere and is not quite as effective as it could have been. As a whole, the show felt over-rehearsed and tired, lacking some of the energy it needed to pull itself up in quality; similarly, some of the more powerful monologues within conversation didn’t feel sincere, but rather rushed and lacking the required emphasis to get their messages across.
The promised profundity behind the play, or at least implied if not promised, isn’t quite found in its actual performance. The subject matter is interesting. The ways of dealing with the situation are interesting too, but the actors prove that this particular topic finds it very easy to fall into cliché. The language breakdown at the end of the play proves this perfectly - coming in too fast and feeling altogether disconnected from the rest of the piece.
The individual performances aren’t bad, though, and both women do an excellent job of jumping through emotional hoops on this rollercoaster of an hour, maintaining attention in what could easily be a boring play.