A Thing Called Love – Seven Arts, Leeds

Writer/Director: Lee Saunders

This unpretentious series of six brief monologues by Lee Saunders clocking in at something over an hour was staged for one night at Seven Arts. A table and chair sat in the middle of the wide acting space and in truth only Rebecca Burrows’ Pole Dancer and Stephanie Hutchinson’s Preacher Lady spent much time out of the chair. Musical links gave the evening a sort of unity, but the real link between the pieces was the role of women and the power of love in today’s society.

The evening begins with Cat Lady, Cathy Purcell becoming fractious when Charlie the cat doesn’t return home. An unhappy relationship is only the last in her failed relationships which began when she was bullied at school and had a precious couple of hours at home alone (with a cat, of course) before her mother returned from work. This is probably the lightest of the monologues, with Purcell fretting about the elderly neighbour who feeds other people’s cats. Charlie, well fed, returns at the end.

This is followed by the most disturbing of the pieces in terms of character revelation, Toxic Love, played with a touching mixture of bravado and despair by Joanne Pollitt-Evans. At her glamorous best she is awaiting the arrival for dinner of her current lover. Cleverly Saunders inserts details that disturb the happy anticipation (he said he might have a couple of pints with the lads beforehand), but soon it becomes full-on self-deception. She has fallen for a wastrel who spends all his time getting out of his head with his worthless mates on drink and drugs. The piece ends with his phone turned off, but you have no faith that the scene will not be repeated.

Maternal Love sees Roanna Walker finding every term on the hate spectrum to describe her ex-partner, but eventually she reaches a more balanced view: without him she would not have two wonderful talented children. As she speaks, he is at the cinema with them, sending a photograph on her mobile: “They look happy,” says Walker – the irony is that two people who hate each other can find unity in their love for two others.

The fourth and sixth monologues come dangerously near to preaching. Burrows’ Pole Dancer is a vivid creation, full of contempt for the ageing retired accountant, Ron, who is there – she says – on the front row and who wishes to take her away from all this – in fact, her part-time degree course is likely to do that. The account of pathetic rich old buffers is totally convincing, so is her love of her own body, but eventually the statements of women’s independence begin to sound like preaching which brings us to Hutchinson, the Preacher Lady who begins spreading joy in happy-clappy vein, but who is required to deliver what amounts to a sermon on the theme of “God is Love – Love is Life’.

Before that Generational Love poses the question of how our world has changed over the past two generations. Visiting her 90-year-old mother in a home where she has been for seven years following a stroke, Kay Gartland, in a nicely understated performance, thinks of her grandmother’s house which was a centre for the whole family, recounts the spread of family down south and to Canada, sees herself as all the family her mother has and asks the question, “Who will look after me if I have a stroke?”. In an evening of contrasts, your reviewer found this piece and Toxic Love the most telling.

Reviewed on 17 July 2026