Love, Question Mark – New Diorama Theatre, London

Writer: Robert Gillespie

Director: Robert Gillespie

Reviewer: Carol Evans

The Public Reviews Rating:

Did you know that Bewick swans mate for life and we – especially if we live in the West – are just like those swans, always on the lookout for Mr or Ms Right?

Retired estate agent Michael Smith in Robert Gillespie’s Love, Question Mark is a typical swan but one with a startling primeval urge to break away. He’d rather be a free-spirited chimpanzee who has countless lady chimps queuing up for him. At least, that’s what he admits, almost shamefacedly, to us all in the audience.

Widowed after 38 years of marriage, set in his ways, a pretty boring man by all accounts, Michael (played with great nervous energy and enthusiasm by Stuart Sessions) found his dormant sexual desires were quite literally aroused by a pair of shapely female legs descending the stairs of a bus. On impulse, he goes against type, buys a prostitute he’s never met from Argentina to come and live with him… but finds the new way of life is not quite what he was expecting – or, indeed, wanting..

Gillespie’s new play challenges us to think outside the box, pointing us in the direction of the words of American satirist and critic H L Mencken that “it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting.”

When Clare Cameron’s sultry, smouldering Maria turns up at his home, Michael thinks he’s on a winner: wall-to-wall sex in every which way, shape or form – but on his terms. She, abused all her life but oozing sex, comes with her own agenda which doesn’t quite conform to Michael’s expectations.

Together this odd couple play out a series of clever scenarios which depict how they have been let down by life. The writing which teeters into black comedy is witty, acerbic with lots of brilliant one liners, many with a wealth of meaning behind them: As Maria, on prostitution (and, no doubt, Michael’s purchase of her) utters: “Men don’t pay you for sex, they pay for you to leave afterwards.”

If nothing else, this play will leave you, maybe at first bewildered, but afterwards will get you thinking. Do we really want to live out our fantasies or should we accept the more humdrum but safer existence?

This is the first play to be performed at the New Diorama Theatre, a brand new acting space in Regents Place, one of London’s newest squares, all glass and high rise, just behind Euston Road. As yet, with no actual signage in place, finding the theatre is a bit like going on a treasure hunt. But once found, this could become a gem in London’s energetic fringe scene.

Love, Question Mark runs until 1 May 2010