Hello everyone, ny name is Rachel Williams. I am a recent graduate of Swansea University’s MA in Creative and Media Writing and part of the 'Young Critic' scheme in Bridgend. Here is my review of Love Steals Us from Loneliness.

“Is that where? ....”

“Yes, and so what?”

“Is it really like that?”

“Oh shut up”

These days I often encounter conversations like this. Sometimes it can end at the first question or go on like that for ages but on rarer, much nicer occasions I can’t tell people to leave it alone and I talk about my home town. In January 2008 I received a text message off a friend asking how I was now I had moved back home – she said she had been reading the papers and was worried. It was nice she was concerned but I sat there in shock: was I now a product of someone’s inventive, sensationalist imagination? I had seen the papers but the Media student I was had seen a nasty, but typical attempt to increase tabloid sales.

I walked out of Hobo’s after Love Steals Us from Loneliness and in yards had to do a double take: right in front of me was familiar image of a young couple arguing, it was a moment of normality and coincidence doubled up and I just stood there staring. It was the play’s hidden argument between the main character Catrin and her ever missing boyfriend Lee come to life, yet it was probably just another harmless argument on an ordinary night out. The play provides a window into the lives of teenagers on what starts as an ordinary night out and its events cause ripples that affect the next forty years. I feel that Gary Owen’s play is a parallel of life and it wants to promise something more than emotional rollercoaster lived through at 17: that life will provide far bigger opportunities, but you have to grow up.

The play is across a 40 year span, with the first half occurring entirely over one night between the ill-fated lovers Catrin and Scott, the second half introduces further character’s central to Lee’s short life and it follows the journeys each character makes after the fateful accident. In order to follow each character a series of monologues are used: fragmenting and weaving between each individual as they lead separate lives or cross paths again. A grieving mother in Mag’s who is unable to live passed her son’s death; Becky as the sister and daughter who wants to move on, needing the attention of her mother as she grows into adulthood but never quite getting it. And Catrin and Scott, their chance at love lost before it can really form and Mikey the cocky, selfish exception to the rule as Catrin’s way out of her grief. Throughout Lee is only physically absent, we are given a clear idea of who he is and was via the relationships he has and the pieces of his life scattered across the set. The recurring Halloween theme serves to shore up the darkness of grief and loss, symbolising the ghostly chain of one death to a group of people.

The National Theatre Wales use of location provides an intrinsic link between the audience and the characters without the closeness, atmosphere and unconscious involvement, in its own way it breaks down that fourth wall in a theatre set. At Hobo’s I was the teenager I used to be and the young adult I am now: transported back to a world of emotions, music and the statement clothes whilst watching the proceedings with an appreciative eye and an understanding. I certainly didn’t want to go up and sing Karaoke – I’d have cleared half the bar of its patron’s I suspect but music is a tool that not only evokes emotion but provides an outlet for it. It is a tool used perfectly by the artistic director and the actors who perform them. By using the bar and the room beside it you follow the characters through their night: you are with them each step of the way. Watching the same activity in a theatre would certainly detract from the impact, particularly a large theatre: it would seem like the further from the characters ‘lives’ you physically sat, the larger the gap between their emotions and your own. In saying this Gary Owen has a play of universal proportions: take it out of its heart and home and it will apply to any teenager in any small town across the world.

One thing that concerned me at the start of the play was the set: the modern art frame of hoops and wires that spread across the stage, what were they a representation of? On reflection they may have been a number of things: a representation of life winding in and around each individual or simply a silent, still stage hand to visualise the pieces of Lee’s life and keep the characters separate for each monologue.

I may not have fallen head over heels but I enjoyed Love Steals Us from Loneliness and definately glad I went to see it.

The play does well not to answer the questions brought to us by the media’s portrayal of Bridgend but simply provide a tribute and encouragement to live life and carry on trying.