ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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Love, Love, Love Lyric Hammersmith London
Caustic comedy on fraught divisions between baby-boomers and Generation X
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ACCORDING to writer Mike Bartlett, families are awful. That’s why London was invented — so that you can move away from them.
FAMILY AT WAR: Love, Love, Love (Pic: Helen Murray)
It's a barb, among many in Love, Love, Love, that draws proper guffaws in what could well be a comedy with tragic themes. It might be a tragedy with lots of laughs. It might not matter what it is — premiered a decade ago, it still has bite.
In it, Rachael Stirling is flamboyant and caustic as Sandra, drinking her own bodyweight in white wine and veering from 1960s hippy chick to power-dressing career woman in 1990 and finally a Chanel-clad divorcee of 2011.
She retains an utter lack of empathy throughout. There’s none for her boyfriend, ditched for a better option, nor for her troubled teenage daughter and bugger-all for her hapless husband.
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