Two women lock eyes in the lock-up and fall in love with each other. They live pretty rough lives, but Tanya (Anna Samson) swears that she’ll protect Annie (Rose Riley) no matter what. They have to make some compromises – Annie is going to do some sex work so they can save money and build a new life together – but their grand plans are interrupted when Tanya is put away again. Annie is devastated and afraid; she can’t bear to be alone. Enter Lorenzo (Hue Xuande).
Written in 2004 by Patricia Cornelius, the diamond-sharp playwright-poet of Australian life below the poverty line, Love follows Tanya, Annie and Lorenzo and the shape of their lives through the lens of their relationships to each other. Tanya’s sure, stone love is a heavy presence, and Lorenzo expects Annie to work at will so he can score drugs, but she says she loves them both: Tanya keeps her safe; Lorenzo makes her laugh.
But things are not, and can’t be, that simple. Their triangle is a knotted one, dotted with manipulations, betrayals, and complicating forces; and the world they’re trying to carve peace into doesn’t have much space for peacefulness.
Under the careful eye of director Rachel Chant, the poetic moments of Cornelius’ script soar: her lyrical, colloquial monologues are the hero of the production, bathed in glory by lighting designer Sian James-Holland and composer and sound designer Nate Edmondson. On Ella Butler’s sketched-out urban cityscape set, Samson and Riley are the stars of those moments, and these are the play’s best moments: sure, true, locked onto the dizzying high-low energy vortex that is Cornelius’ speciality.
But there are other moments where the production feels cautious, the reality of the characters held at arm’s length. Those moments, propelled by bluster, feel forced: the production then feels less realist, more didactic.
Love is 14 years old now but you can still feel in its DNA her desire to capture something essential, real and un-sentimental about people we tend to ignore, or whose tragedies we fetishise; this is a play that demands we don’t clutch our proverbial pearls and think, “those poor people”. This play is designed to be clear-eyed and honest; that’s how Cornelius restore an oft-artistically exploited class its dignity. But the play creaks here a few times under its own weight. In 2018, Patricia Cornelius is regarded as one of our greatest playwrights; tackling one of her plays involves gravity and responsibility that, a few years ago, might not have been so keenly felt.
It’s easy to see how this production – fine, strong, occasionally clunking – has been swallowed by its own sense of responsibility. Over the course of the run, that might settle and relax as the team lives in the play, not in its legacy. This isn’t an easy production, but it’s an admirable one.