Love Stories devised by William Gammel, Eliza Smith & Clea Purkis
The Blue Room Theatre, KAOS Room
60 minutes (no interval)

Walking into The Blue Room Theatre KAOS Room to see whale skeletons centre stage feels as though I’m on the precipice of animal worship. And in a delightful way, Love Stories is exactly that. 

The show is a beauty, with many nuggets of wise and down-to-earth storytelling. The show impresses as well as moves with its unabashed sincerity and willingness to bring together poetry, science and love. Cosmic sounds, birdsong, and whale vocalisations pierce the air, the feeling of heaving lungs coming into sonic balance with the installation art is visceral.  Delaney Burke is brilliant on AV and brings together a pixelated look to an otherwise nature-washed stage. 

The stories, embedded in a narrative arc that do not quite seize on the chance to impress with dialogue, still really helped me feel my way into the show. The tender stories and sense of collective grief at a world losing itself to human society, moment by moment, become poignant from the projected words on canvas curated by director, Nathan Calvert. These scientifically based poems felt authentic and mesmerising. 

In Love Stories, love is mentioned often, but it’s never cringe-worthy. There’s a glow in the performers faces whenever the word is spoken. The man whose wife left him after a month of marriage who then loots an absurd amount of butterflies… this is love.  The reminiscence of a mother-son relationship where music brings him home from grief. This is love. 

We are faced with many questions. The actors gently ask: if an animal is irrelevant to the human ecosystem, does that make that creature insignificant? If an animal is ugly or unintelligent – does that make it inconsequential? 

Sound, the audible world, is everything. The dominant sense, touch, that we humans live by is not the focus of this show. Diversity of animals, sperm whales, blue whales, a myriad kinds of birds, the sound of pages turning and dogs yawning: comforting sounds is what Love Stories is promoting. The show’s true narrative arc is told in sound rather than spoken word. 

While the humour in the script is harmless, it doesn’t always find a way into the show’s heart. The dialogue fits but the performers could be more engaged with each other than the dialogue allows. As well as this, the show can sometimes have the feeling of presentation, which leaves it in the zone of diorama rather than seething with the life it has within. Yet there are plenty of rich, inspired, rhythmic, awesome, dumbfoundingly beautiful and fun moments too!

The strength of Love Stories is the projected word and the array of sounds that build to a shrill and shocking human scream by performer Clea Purkis who offers her voice in robust way. Let’s just say that final malignant moment strikes a chord, as Eliza Smith feeds us with tid-bits of  marginalised scientific history, her presence is lovely and warming and passionate. 

Human-centric life as you know it may be questioned in this show – but don’t worry – it will turn your world upside down in the most wholesome way. I would not shy away from taking young people to see Love Stories – a gentle riot of sound and stories like this is likeable, but not easy to find – one that non-violently questions our future without making it seem fearful or futile. 

Love Stories continues until the 5th July.

For more information, visit:
https://blueroom.org.au/events/love-stories/