Search

Saved articles

You have not yet added any article to your bookmarks!

Browse articles

GDPR Compliance

We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of cookies, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service.

Second Summer of Love

 
Rebecca Vines Review by Rebecca Vines 4 Published: 29 Aug 2022 Pleasance Courtyard Show Dates: 3 Aug 2022-29 Aug 2022

Yummy Mummy (and Headmaster’s wife, just for extra grown-up points) Louise runs the school choir and helps her teenaged daughter with her homework. She goes to the village exercise class and pops to Waitrose. Oh, and she lives in Surrey, just in case you needed any more hints that she is positively, absolutely, resolutely Middle Class.

The heady days of tape decks and windy windows in cars, Hubba-Bubba and taking ages to snog the boy you fancied

But Louise is finding her Oliver Bonas life just a little… boring. And so she allows herself to float back to the memories of her younger days, when she would sneak out of the school she now lives in to get shitfaced at one of the warehouse raves which characterised 1990s youth culture. Emmy Happisburgh creates Louise as a sympathetic character whose energy and slight goofiness barely abates with age; also playing her motley crew of rufflers Brian (bucket hat), Julie (posh blonde), and Eddie (sexy smile). It is a charming and highly physical performance which chimes particularly resonantly with those of us of a certain cultural niche; throwing us back to the heady days of tape decks and windy windows in cars, Hubba-Bubba and taking ages to snog the boy you fancied.

But there is a sadness too, of missed opportunities and lost connections… of how it felt to be intoxicated by youth… of the ecstasy of… well, Ecstasy. For drugs loom large in the vision of Louise’s rose-tinted specs, and offer a prism on the past every bit as problematic as it is rapturous. Her reliance on disco biscuits to define her may have been replaced by family duties, but the result is the same… her own dreams and hopes and talents have been buried in an avalanche of euphoric love through which it becomes increasingly hard to trudge.


My Second Summer of Love is a warm and witty performance which is as uplifting and sunny as it is dank and sweaty. It is, essentially, the tale we all will tell, and one as old of time… of how our physical flexibility and learned sagacity never quite meet during the long littleness of our lives.

Related to this article:

Location:

Performances

The Blurb:

Carol Tambor Award winners Pants on Fire present one woman's first-hand nostalgia trip through the early 90s UK rave scene. Original raver Louise wonders how she went from ecstasy-taking, anti-establishment idealist, to respectable, disillusioned school-gate yummy mummy. A solo story of first love, teenage kicks, mother-daughter bonds, raising palms to the skies in fields and the ups and downs of recreational drug-taking. 'Pants on Fire are capable of the purest theatre' (Metro). 'A shining example of what theatre is' (BritishTheatreGuide.info). 'Happisburgh is mesmerising' (TheSpyInTheStalls.com).