Love Is Like a Violin

Jana Bokova's observational portraits (her NFS films Jokey and Militia Battlefield; her TV films on Don McCullin and Marevna and Marika) have been highly achieved and entertaining examples of cinéma-vérité that engage with character through 'performance'; a film about a community theatre group would seem a natural progression. Yet the film emerges as an intriguing bundle of contradictions. In attempting to document how the Common Stock theatre company creates a performance for, and with material gathered from, pensioners in Hammersmith, Bokova appears torn between an analysis of a process and a series of contrasted group portraits of actors and OAPs.