'50 Ways to Leave Your Lover' at The Bush Theatre
In one of the most memorable on-screen break-ups of recent years, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw was famously dumped by way of a Post-it note stuck onto her laptop, with the words: “I'm sorry, I can't. Don't hate me”.
‘50 Ways to Leave your Lover,’ now playing at The Bush Theatre, is a fast-paced montage of similar relationship meltdowns, ranging from the hilarious and heart-breaking to the completely ridiculous.
Intriguingly, the audience attending the one-hour performance on Monday night was 75% female. Are women the only ones affected by relationship break-ups, then?
We were initially welcomed to an evening of “heartbreak and misery”, but as well as the inevitable bitterness, anger and tears associated with any break-up, the myriad of characters - all played by Ralf Little, Claire Keelan, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Michelle Terry – were, above all, comical.
“Don’t cry,” says one man as he dumps his girlfriend. “This will all take so much longer if you cry.”
A rapping song, performed by Ralf Little and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith brought the house down, with its juvenile and farcical lyrics: “My faith in love has been lost in flight…..like luggage,” the boys sing.
The break-up clichés are all there too: “I need space,” “Let's take a break,” “It's not you, it's me,” “I’m gay”.
Over the past year, the Bush Theatre has asked its audience-members to send in their real-life break-up stories. The resulting tales of woe and heartache were then woven together by five of The Bush’s writers: Leah Chillery, Ben Ellis, Stacey Gregg, Lucy Kirkwood and Ben Schiffer.
The result: fifty vignettes, songs and one-liners, punctuated by marital bed-time rows and the repeated appearance of a fumbling young man, desperately trying to find a way of telling his girlfriend it’s over.
In one sketch, we witness the heartbreaking story of a woman who is stood up on a date and returns home downcast. Eventually, after much anticipation and disappointment, she receives a text from her boyfriend, which reads: “Have you the got the message now?”
This is a play with no taboos: the profuse swearing, cocaine snorting, girl-on-girl action and references to bestiality are clearly meant to shock and push the boundaries. But one boundary is pushed way too far: the ‘jokes’ about leukaemia and disabled children were, in my opinion, tasteless and unnecessary and ruined what was otherwise a very funny script.
I also could have done without the sight of Holdbrook-Smith’s trousers hovering half-way down his bottom for most of the show. If he needs a belt, I would happily lend him one.
One of the very best scenes involves a character played by Ralf Little, standing in court after accidentally burning his ex-girlfriend’s house down in a revenge-attack gone wrong. “In break-ups, there are different rules for men and women,” he muses. “If women take action, it’s revenge. If men do, it’s a crime.”
It is a shame there weren’t more boys in the house to appreciate this observation. As Carrie Bradshaw herself would have said: “I couldn’t help but wonder: where were all the men?”
Yasmine Estaphanos
22 July 2008
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