Three generations, three heartbreaks and a vase that keeps on blooming.
Galentine’s Day is usually sold as a celebration of brunch and unbridled female friendship, but in Morgan Clarice’s The Love That I’ve Lost it is closer to a coping mechanism. Michelle, newly separated,decides to host one in the hope of distracting herself and her family from the men they have lost.
The family in question spans three generations. Betty (Nina Anderson) is a grandmother whose husband, now in hospice, no longer remembers her, while her daughter Michelle (Amelia Dunn) is divorcing and her young adult granddaughter Lillie (Harriet Spence-Reid) is hung up on a new crush. Over those few days the three women grate on one another, fall apart separately and, eventually, begin to notice each other.
That sense of three distinct generations is established before anyone speaks, largely through the costumes. Each woman has her own colour, with Betty in blue, Michelle in green and Lillie in purple, and they change tops as the play goes on, trading going-out looks for relaxed ones in a way that gives the whole production a pleasing cartoon logic. The generational divide is traced in the smaller details too, since Lillie wears Doc Martens and has a charm dangling from her phone, Michelle is in Vans with a battered flip-case, and Betty, in sensible shoes, is never seen with a mobile anywhere near her. Someone has clearly paid attention, and it is appreciated.
The set is thoughtfully assembled, if slightly overstocked. A table and two chairs sit stage right, a chest of photographs stands at the back, a lone chair and bin occupy one corner, and a vase of flowers perches on a shelf to the left. Each piece is put to use at some point, yet a leaner design would have given the actors more room to breathe. The vase is the shrewdest of them, for as the play goes on it fills with more and more blooms, a quiet and lovely image of women who are losing love from the men in their lives while gathering it from one another.
It is the performances, though, that give those images their weight, and Nina Anderson’s Betty provides the highlight. She sings Patsy Cline’s “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray” in a small, devastating solo that sums up her situation, and it lingers precisely because so little else around her seems to understand it. The play is generous with this sort of structure, handing each woman a solo breakdown, pairing them off in mother-daughter and duo scenes, and then bringing all three together. Harriet Spence-Reid delivers Lillie’s line that love is a game of luck, and that she is unlucky, with a rueful laugh, as does Amelia Dunn with Michelle’s admission that she loves the idea of love.
The writing is not without its wobbles – paint splashed on Michelle’s shirt, one of the few moments in which she is out of green, is used to steer the conversation back towards the men, and although the manoeuvre is clumsy, it is forgivable because we have seen it coming from some distance. The play purposely fails the Bechdel test since these are women whose conversations are dominated by the men they have lost, and Lillie’s idea of being “chosen” shows how easily that loss can become the lens through which they measure themselves. What saves it from circling the same ground is the shift in the family itself, for these women begin by interrupting one another to talk about their men and end by actually listening to each other’s pain.
The Love That I’ve Lost is a warm and quietly affecting piece of theatre. Tthe acting is strong throughout, with Anderson, Dunn and Spence-Reid forming a believable family whose bickering and breakdowns feel honest and Clarice, who writes and directs, and producer Lacey Beaumont have made something modest that knows what it wants to say.
The Love That I’ve Lost has concluded its run at Bread and Roses, London.