Performance anxiety hangs over Jeanette Cronin's I Love You Now.From the first, a couple furtively meet in a hotel room. It's a tryst of fits and starts, fumbling foreplay and a tango that is a four foot tangle. Betrayal, guilt, denial are so embedded that it seems unlikely any kind of bedding is going to happen.
You see, Leo is married to June but is having an affair with his twin brother's wife, Michelle, as well as a no strings fling with their nanny, Melissa, and an unethical dalliance with his therapist, Dr Shaw.
June is in flagrante with Leo's twin brother, Rob, her fitness instructor, Helmut, and Leo's confessor, John, a Catholic priest. Well, really!
I Love You Now is a puzzle of role play, with playful playwright Cronin and Paul Gleeson performing all the roles. No performance anxiety is evident in Cronin's portrayals – they are gusto robusto and well defined to delineate the various characters. She's as adept at bedroom farce as at tragic emotional fragility, showing the shell shock of depleted domestic bliss under the bombardment of domestic blitz. Gleeson is more a male cypher, literally suffering performance anxiety mixed with sibling rivalry and paternity suspicion – issues with issue.
Isabel Hudson's set is a warm walnut hotel room, a place where randy rendezvous is reduced to heartfelt soul searching. It is superbly lit by lighting designer Martin Kinnane. Musical accompaniment is provided by Max Lambert on keyboards and Roger Lock on guitar. These musicians are not relegated to an orchestra pit or hidden back stage, but positioned in plain sight behind the hotel window, which is a distracting construct pulling focus from a complex scenario.
I Love You Now is one of those plays that lingers in the imagination, so that if you didn’t quite love it then, you may just learn to love it now.
Darlinghurst Theatre Company presents
I Love You Now
by Jeanette Cronin
Director Kim Hardwick
Venue: Eternity Playhouse | 39 Burton Street, Darlinghurst NSW
Dates: 9 Jun – 9 Jul 2017
Tickets: $38 – $54
Bookings: 02 8356 9987
