Theatre review - Love With A Capital “L”, Glasgow
Love With A Capital “L” - Oran Mor, Glasgow
***
Tony Cox’s new two-hander for the Play, Pie and Pint season – set to travel on to the Traverse this week, and then to Birnam – makes no direct reference to Reith’s Scottish identity, but this brief 40-minute dialogue, set in Reith’s office around 1930, does explore the almost missionary sense of religious piety that drove his work, and the intense inner conflicts it created in a passionate man who never found sexual or emotional fulfilment.
The play begins as Reith calls into his office his young Head of Talks, Hilda Matheson, who has – in Reith’s view – been commissioning broadcasts from too many left-wing liberals, including members of the Bloomsbury Group. It soon becomes clear, though, that Reith’s reprimand has a subtext, as he uses accusations against Matheson over her relationship with Vita Sackville-West to reveal his own torment over an early lost love-affair with a young male friend.
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Hide AdIn Hamish Pirie’s production, Benny Young and Lesley Hart play Reith and Matheson with feeling, although in a style that sometimes seems as stilted as the prosier portions of the script. And although the play’s message is finally very simple – that the historic suppression of homosexual love created boundless unhappiness – it still comes as a vivid reminder of that sad truth, in the week when gay couples in England and Wales gained the right to marry, at last.
joyce MCMILLAN
• Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1-5 April; Birnam Arts Centre, 7-11 April