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
