Writer: Sabah Kemp
Directors: Sophia Woolfenden and Freya Frank
A packed studio, a staggered platform, a duvet that doubles as a shower curtain: the pizza barge of the billing never materialises, and it isn’t missed. Cadillac Productions’ two-hander needs only its performers to conjure a five-strong polycule mid-wedding party, and what might have been a seminar on ‘ethical non-monogamy’ proves to be warmer: a self-aware comedy confronting the realities of experimentation, jealousy and regret included.
Lewis Grimshaw and Freya Frank carry four-odd characters apiece, switches signalled by voice and body alone, flashbacks by a shift of light. Grimshaw moults from Max – a proud, curious, newly promoted TK Maxx floor manager, who polygamised in haste and repents at leisure – into a succession of camp and posh boffins, one hopelessly enthralled by Frank’s magnificently Sofia Vergara-grade girlfriend (“the last person to know my age is dead – and immigration control”).
She takes him to bed on discovering he is Cornish, her penchant for all things Cornwall remaining comically unexplained. The caricatures are broad – the camp, the Latin, the polyamorous themselves – and permitted, because the deprecation comes from inside the polycule: even “ethical non-monogamy” arrives with its own raised eyebrow.
The comic spine is a neat cruelty: Max talks Mila into the polycule against her warnings, she blossoms, and he curdles into jealousy that she predicted. His mid-crisis howl – “Polygamy is all about talking and not about fucking, and nobody fucking told me” – detonates the room, and earns it: polygamy here more admin than orgy. An unending negotiation about negotiations.
Sabah Kemp excels in devising a piece with an appetite beyond its headcount. Yet Love (5 Ways), like its lovers, has commitment issues of its own. Two of Grimshaw’s characters, Gracie and camp-as-Carr Rob, sit too close in countenance to track; Frank’s red dress works against her male Reuben, and her quicker switches occasionally outpace the audience.
The wordless interludes – bodies intertwined under dim purple light to stringed instrumentals – hold the room silent, but sit oddly on a show whose native tongue is satire; likewise a closing poem (grain, requested from a butcher) that arrives too abruptly to land as the benediction it reaches for. But it’s a joy to see Grimshaw’s whiplash from a hard-done-by Max to the gloriously outrageous Rob; likewise for the contrast between Frank’s stern Mila and American influencer-type exhibitionist, who’d rather her totty boyfriend watch her than touch her.
Slow to warm, then cackles galore: only Cadillac’s second production, and already sharp enough for Edinburgh. More, as the polycule insists, the merrier.
Reviewed on 29 August and then at Edinburgh Fringe
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
80%
Slow to warm, then cackles galore