Three Sang of Love Together

Arranged and directed by student, Dasha Dubovitskaya, Three Sang of Love Together is a cleverly devised short piece of theatre assembled from excerpts of some of the most famous poetry in the English language. Narrated by three women (Amanda Mahr, Anna Stewart and Miriam Early) and one man (Jon Kidd), the timeless words of Shakespeare and Rossetti are fused with more modern bards such as Wendy Cope and Fleur Adcock to create an assortment of fleeting scenes and short-lived characters, all wrestling with the notion of love.

The play begins a little too quietly with Early’s opening lines lost by the time they reach the back of the auditorium but she quickly ups the volume and establishes the first voice of the piece: a young, wistful girl. From here, with sharp alterations in lighting as scenes and characters change, the three female actors are established. Early’s naïve girl is interrupted by Mahr’s first persona, a sassy femme-fatale, rhyming off slang terms for male genitalia. She is replaced by the tragic, wheelchair-bound figure of a woman played by Stewart, portraying the darker side of love in an abusive relationship.

Each female performs solo, with stand-out performances from Mahr, who narrates Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Little Red Cap’ with fiery passion, and Stewart who brings into harsh reality the tragic words of Billie Holiday’s ‘My Man’. Wendy Cope’s ‘Bloody Men’ is transformed into a duet between Stewart and Mahr as two women at a bus stop, capturing perfectly the comic sentiments of the poem whilst maintaining the melancholic ending.

Where the piece falters, however, is in the attempt to inject a firmer narrative over the independent scenes towards the end. A plot arises suddenly of a man leaving for war and leaving his woman which drags on much longer than previous enactments and feels incongruous to the rest of the piece. The insertion of Kipling’s violent war poem ‘Infantry Columns’ startles and disrupts the production and detracts from an otherwise pleasant and contemplative exploration of the poetry of love through the ages.