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 Her reliance on disco biscuits to define her may have been replaced by family duties, but the result is the same… her own dreams and hopes and talents have been buried in an avalanche of euphoric love through which it becomes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.
