★★★★✰
Chatting with Laura Thurlow after her show, she says that she has never been as open in her other works. Thurlow tells me that her spoken word poems about love maintain a certain distance between herself and the audience. It is the “compulsion to create and be heard” that led her to this raw one-woman show about love. As we sit outside the Canal Café Theatre, Thurlow opens up about her previous outlook on romantic love and how A Preoccupation with Romantic Love finally puts it to rest.
Thurlow plays herself as she takes us through the voicemails of six exes. She invites us to an exorcism of the mark they left on her. Designating a random tarot card to each ex, she casts them out. Richard (Toby Jeffries) and Bernard’s (Mustaph El Yousfi) voicemails start the play off with a tongue-in-cheek sardonic tone. We hear infuriating mansplains on Thurlow’s ignorance of Scorsese films and her inability to fit neatly into an ex’s life. As Thurlow progresses, we see her struggle to pursue love despite how many times it has caused her harm.
Thurlow’s performance is clearly heartfelt and is taking us on a deeply personal journey. With a lifelong fixation on romantic love, her 60-minute monologue leads us away from fairy tales and happy endings. Love and its related struggles reach beyond the relationships themselves. Johnny and Bernard leave Thurlow feeling like “petite equals desirable” and that she was “only ever made up of issues”. Her monologue starts as a charmingly poetic insight into the pursuit of love, even when it hurts. She casts out the negative energy of her exes with plan of starting again, tabula rasa.
However, as we reach the rough drinker, Johnny (Charlie Blanshard), the play becomes more nuanced. I worried that we would only see the shortcomings of the exes, omitting Thurlow’s role in these breakups. Dylan (Max Aspen) begins to hold the mirror up to Thurlow. He ghosts Thurlow and but Thurlow provides her self-deprecating imagining of what he would have said to end the relationship. The scathing remark “I wish you hadn’t told me quite so much” is immediately challenged by Sam (Daniel Camou), who accuses her of shutting him out. Only upon dropping the phone does Thurlow lose control of the narrative and must admit to guilt on her part.
Her breakup with her best friend, Molly (Demi Anter), and her challenging therapist, showcase her unwillingness to express her anger. It is clear that ‘casting out’ is not a feasible option, not when “it hurts to want” love. But rather than letting the impact of lost love seem like a defeat, Thurlow’s continued hope is a gentle victory. With all the bruises of past lovers, she dreams of love that “doesn’t hurt and nothings breaks”. A Preoccupation with Romantic Love still ends as a preoccupation but one with more hope and kindness laced into it.
A Preoccupation with Romantic Love will be performed at Camden Fringe on 16 and 17 August, and Edinburgh Fringe from 5-11 and 19-27 August.
Words by Elizabeth Sorrell
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