Savage/Love

Moulding physical theatre to a straightforward love story, Savage/Love stages two young lovers going through the motions of falling in and out of love. As they gawkily engage in a spate of soul-searching, we quite literally see their souls, played by two separate performers, wriggling and writhing on stage, supposedly dialoguing in expressive contortions what their physical counterparts struggle to communicate in words.

The vapid and derivative script urges the audience more in the direction of the gestural subscript, yet there is nothing special there either. The fledgling performers clearly have a profound interest in physical theatre but they detrimentally confuse this for applicable talent. In hiding their lack of experience in the art behind a token narrative, they spinelessly eschew refinement and end up with a tepid show notable for nothing.

Savage/Love has a long way to go before it ripens into a production that deserves a paying audience. As it stands, it is an ostentatious play that all too eagerly flaunts work in progress, and it comes to no surprise that it lasts a mere 25 minutes despite publicising a duration of 70 minutes.