"Love and Money". BT Studio

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website.

Dennis Kelly’s 2006 play kick-started his career and simultaneously kicked traditional playwriting in the teeth. This week Love and Money is staged at the BT by newly-founded theatre company Matchbox (tagline ‘a striking new production company’) – and they seem to have struck gold.

If you liked Kelly’s 2013 Channel 4 series Utopia (and if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour: episode one is 10p to download on Amazon Prime) Love and Money will fill you with joy. It has Kelly’s unique style, where characters are somehow simultaneously larger than life and smaller than human, and where they do bizarre, extreme, disturbing things for apparently no reason, but by the end it all makes exactly the amount of sense that Kelly intended. In other words, it’s a wild ride, but you know you can trust the driver.

The structure has all the tortuous logic of a cryptic crossword: divided into eight discrete scenes, the play runs chronologically backwards, tracing the doomed course of a relationship. But in each of those scenes the master plot takes a back seat to some other foregrounded subject, so that it feels almost like a collection of short stories, linked by a golden, and sometimes barely perceptible, thread. This works so well because every scene is bursting with freshness, whether it’s about a woman killing and eviscerating a mouse, an elderly couple demolishing their next-door-neighbour’s mausoleum, or (in perhaps the most dramatic scene of them all) a man cross-examining his wife about why she was on Oxford Street staunching the bleeding of a passer-by who’s been stabbed in the chest. The violence and threat was so intense that audience members in the front row were flinching and squealing (like eviscerated mice) on more than one occasion.

The theatrical fireworks aren’t just for show. There’s method in the madness. The interconnections of the chapters carry an implication of our interconnectedness as a society, and this is picked up in the final scene which discusses the randomness of gravity (or Love?) as a prerequisite for universal life. Selfishness (or Money?) breaks the connections, shatters the gravity that holds the atoms of society together.

But enough analysis.

The team at Matchbox (especially co-directors Vasco Faria and Sonya Luchanskaya) have put together a superb cast of actors who capture the cold wit, horror and anger of Kelly’s script, and serve it up with passion and fun. The pace is an eager canter, with characters frequently (and deliberately) talking over each other, while still leaving moments of stasis pregnant with awkward despair. And the music they’ve chosen feels like it comes straight out of the Utopia playlist: thrumming with rhythm, and peppered with oddness. In a term dominated by new writing, this was a salutory reminder that Britain has some truly great established playwrights who deserve to be seen.