Love Hurts

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on LOVE HURTS at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 21.10.11
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3 stars ***

STAGED AS PART of this year’s Glasgay! Festival, which opened this week, Johnny McKnight’s new 55-minute monologue is a strange show, almost perfect in form, yet slightly unsatisfying in content. Set in a leafy Glasgow suburb, Love Hurts is the story of Susie, a young married woman with a history of mental illness, who becomes fascinated by the apparently glamorous couple who live across the road. Val and Nicky are childless, well-to-do and sexually adventurous; and while Susie’s policeman husband grunts unresponsively in the background, and net curtains twitch along the road, she becomes heavily involved with them, first venturing into new sexual territory with Val, and then falling in love with Nicky, who seems to offer the masculine tenderness her husband deliberately withholds.

The story ends badly and violently, as Susie finally loses touch with reality; but along the way, McKnight handles the narrative with an impressively light touch, combining sharp observational comedy in the style of early Liz Lochhead – for Susie is not slow to bitch over other people’s colour-schemes – with a dark sense of the violence implicit in loveless sexual thrill-seeking. In the end, this story of suburban swingers seems more 1970’s than 21st century, and its point is far from clear. Yet the show is presented with terrific wit and skill by actress Toni Frutin, to the sound of a memorable dark score by Alan Penman; and there’s a sense that once McKnight finds a subject worth his steel, there will be no stopping him, as writer, director, and all-round man of the theatre.

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