For All The Love You Lost theSpaceUK Aug 17th 2021

“For All The Love You Lost” is a production from Morosophy Productions. The cast and crew are made up from both students and graduates from Royal Holloway University of London. The dictionary definition of  morosophy is “foolish pretence of wisdom”, but perhaps no one truly has wisdom at all, pretending or otherwise.

The first thing that struck me about this production was the script, this is a word driven performance and that always interests me as this is not a casual sit down and be “amused” for 50 minutes or so show, the detail is in the words and you have to pay attention to all of them because “For All The Love You Lost” is asking a lot of big questions to which there are simply no definitive (or otherwise) answers.

At its surface we follow two young people (Alex and Harriet) getting ready for their first date which has been arranged online.  Both are nervous of the meeting and both have their own emotional scars of the past to deal with before and during this meeting.  Both are trying to come to terms with the loss of “love” in very different circumstances and both are afraid of being hurt again. A small cast of support characters are in this production, but again they are all asking questions too, and often getting no answers to guide them.

The importance of having family and friends to support you during an emotional (or other) crisis in your life is clearly stated here, but also we enter the far darker realms of the human psyche. What if you are not supporting the person who is supporting you?  What if you are missing something?  What if what you are seeing in someone is an illusion, nothing more than Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of A Clown”.

A few things interest me in this production, but one of them is just how reliant a generation of people have become on being able to call someone on their mobile phone at any time they need to.  The social media and mobile technology aspect of modern life is lightly touched upon here, but it is changing how we interact socially as people are potentially constantly connected to each other now and how you use or abuse that can have ongoing consequences in your life.  For myself, I can’t imagine a world where someone intrudes upon your date with someone with a phone call.

There are so many big questions being asked in this production that our main story line at times becomes nothing more than a back-drop, and that was maybe not intended that way.  Is there a reason to us being here?  Who can answer that question, let alone even attempt it in a 50 minute show.

This is a very good script with a lot of shades of emotion in it.  Sometimes though, those shades of emotion are not coming over to me in the body language or the voices of the cast, sometimes these are just words to them. Loss is more than an emotion, it is a physical state of being.

There is, despite the darker shades of emotions here, a lightness to this production, an optimist’s view of life that things will get better, that there is light at the end of the tunnel.  Perhaps this view of life is why they get so upset when bad things happen, perhaps the pessimists are better prepared for life’s misfortunes and genuinely surprised when things turn out right.  Sometimes you just have to accept that that light at the end of the tunnel might actually be the 12.15 express train heading right towards you!

Review by Tom King (c) 2021
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