Review: Love All

A bitingly witty & feminist “anti-romantic comedy” that you simply mustn’t miss this week at the Corpus Playroom


While British author and poet Dorothy L. Sayers is a name known worldwide for her crime and mystery writing, her talent as a playwright is sometimes overshadowed by her work as novelist – but make no mistake, that’s by no means due to a lack of dramatic talent on Sayers’ end, and anybody who catches this Week 3 run of her 1940 comedy Love All will realise that from the get-go.

What begins as a playful sketch of the surprisingly dramatic everyday life of a runaway husband and romance author, Godfrey, and his mistress, a famous actress called Lydia, in which they bicker and make up and bicker again in the baking heat of their Venice apartment, eventually turns into a bitingly witty comedy exploring outdated gendered beliefs about women in the workplace and the never-ending battle between work and family, as brought to a heated head by the fact that Godfrey’s wife Edith has secretly become a hugely successful playwright in his absence.

The cast of Love All. Image credits: Maria Woodford

The set design on the Corpus Playroom stage was simply beautiful: adhering to the team’s 1930s drawing room comedy aspirations perfectly, the old-time setting was framed perfectly and the charmingly sophisticated costume design only added to this effect. Indeed, while the minor adjustments made to the set when the action transitioned from Venice to London worked well, the staging undoubtedly worked best as Venice in the first half of the play.

The music and bustling noise of the Venice Grand Canal were transferred across the speakers without a hitch, and the small size and artificial heat of the Corpus Playroom made Lydia’s constant complaints about the summer weather all the more believable (although I do doubt that the Corpus heating policies were under the control of the direction team…).

Not only was Love All aesthetically on point throughout (even down to the charming promotional photos taken in advance), but the acting was on point, too: I’ve never been as impressed by the acting in a student play here in Cambridge as I was last night (and I’ve seen some excellent plays, make no mistake), the entire cast was simply fantastic. The lead performances by Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin as Lydia, Gabrielle Shennan as Edith, and Isaac Allen as Godfrey of course stole the show, but not a single member of the cast disappointed last night.

The cast. Image credits: Maria Woodford

As mentioned, the passions of Edith and Lydia for their jobs as a playwright and actress respectively provoke tensions towards the end of the play as they – ironically – debate which of them would be the best wife for Godfrey in the long run, all while Godfrey repeatedly declares that any woman he is to be married to must give up their work and stay at home while he writes his novels.

“Every great man has had a woman behind him.”
“And every great woman has had some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.”

As the plotlines thicken and interweave in increasingly farcical ways, this comedy provokes countless laugh-out-loud moments, and winds up being a clever social commentary which never once feels heavy-going or preachy, a rarity in political/social theatre, and something to be celebrated indeed: director Frances Myatt has achieved something truly special here.

Image credits: Maria Woodford

Interestingly, though, upon its first run in 1940, Love All was not commercially successful at all, and even more interestingly, it was announced following the end of this 2-hour performance that this is believed to be the first performance of the piece for 80 years.

Perhaps Sayers was too ahead of her time, for I consider that a travesty – this is a hidden gem of 1940s theatre, and I’ve no doubt she would have been delighted with this performance at the Corpus Playroom. I struggle to imagine that this version of Love All could realistically have gone any better, and it’s more than worth stopping by at if you have 2 hours to spare this week.

5/5

Love All will be running at the Corpus Playroom at 7.00pm from Tuesday 8th to Saturday 12th February. Tickets are available here.

Feature image credits: Anna Piper-Thompson