Oh, das liest sich aber gut! Armitage ist superb und 4 von 5 Sternen - danke, Laudine!
Und weiter geht's:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/th ... tJjHLCewwIZitat:
Review: In ‘Love, Love, Love,’ All You Need Is Selfishness.
NYT Critics’ Pick
By BEN BRANTLEY
OCTOBER 19, 2016
Now here’s a couple who know how to grow old in style. Portraying a pair of soul mates in selfishness in Mike Bartlett’s “Love, Love, Love,” which opened on Wednesday night at the Laura Pels Theater, Amy Ryan and Richard Armitage advance from the ages of 19 to 64 with a galloping satirical wit that pulls you along, happy and appalled, through the decades.
Not that Kenneth (Mr. Armitage) and Sandra (Ms. Ryan) are easy to like, much less love. True, they appear to feel something like real affection for each other. But don’t expect them to think too much about the problems of anybody else, including their own children, or to suffer those who come between them and their creature comforts.
Such is the nature of two Grade-A examples of the idealists who came of age in the 1960s, those bright young things bent on ushering in a new era of peace, love, freedom and happiness. Or, to use the term most commonly applied to this now graying band of flower children, the baby boomers.
“Love, Love, Love” is a none-too-subtle indictment of a generation from the protean British author of more ambitious (and better) works as varied as the brilliant future-history play “King Charles III,” and the ruthless “Cockfight Play,” which presented the romantic triangle as a gladiator fight. Starting with its title — taken from the opening chant of the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” — this play rumbles with a sometimes too easy irony. It presents the archetypal likes of Kenneth and Sandra as “careless people” in the mode of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from “The Great Gatsby,” insular solipsists who never register the havoc they wreak in their pursuit of pleasure.
And yet I have to admit I had a swell time at “Love, Love, Love,” a Roundabout Theater Company production, impeccably directed by Michael Mayer and featuring a nigh-perfect five-member ensemble rounded out by Alex Hurt, Ben Rosenfield and Zoe Kazan. That’s partly because Mr. Bartlett’s heat-seeking intelligence can’t help locating the telling and authentic emotional detail even within caricature. And there’s pleasure to be derived in a comedy as scrupulously and symmetrically assembled as this one is.
But the greatest joy in “Love, Love, Love” comes from the chance it affords its stars to conquer the aging process and to demonstrate how people change — or more to the point, remain themselves — over the years. It’s a challenge to which Mr. Armitage, in his New York debut, and Ms. Ryan rise with blissful dexterity. They have been given the expected period-defining costumes (by Susan Hilferty) and hair styles, but it’s their postures and poses that most evocatively place them in time.
We first see their characters as Oxford students on summer break in London in 1967, in the grotty flat of Kenneth’s brother, Henry (Mr. Hurt, wonderfully resentful), filled with a heady sense of license and the smugness that comes from being 19 in a decade when youth was the supreme virtue. “Young people, our age, we’re the moment,” trills Sandra.
The second act, set in 1990, finds them as the parents of two teenage children, Rose and Jamie (Ms. Kazan and Mr. Rosenfield), in their comfortably appointed home in a middle-class suburb of London. Progress being what it is here, the third act takes place in 2010, in even more luxurious digs. (Derek McLane did the spot-on sets.)
Though it’s Henry whom Sandra has come to visit in the first scene, it’s the younger, more malleable Kenneth for whom she immediately feels an affinity. Wearing a Mondrian-print, Yves Saint Laurent-style dress and, by her own delighted admission, stoned to the gills, Ms. Ryan’s Sandra exudes a sensuous, dithery confidence that is silly, pretentious and absolutely commanding.
And the way she walks! Her gait combines the uncertainty of the perpetually inebriated with an angular, stalking purposefulness that persists long after Sandra, who becomes a successful career woman, has swapped weed for wine. Ms. Ryan, known for intense stage (“Detroit,” “A Streetcar Named Desire”) and film (“Gone Baby Gone”) work, gives a smashing comic performance that never stoops to excess in presenting an excessive character.
Mr. Armitage is just as good, capturing the passivity of a man who both resents and enjoys being led by a streamlined bulldozer. Best known as the mighty Thorin Oakenshield in the “Hobbit” movies, this English actor was also the best John Proctor I have ever seen, in Yael Farber’s production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” at the Old Vic in London. Here he tones down his natural intensity to remind us that the seemingly soft, spineless and charming can be as damaging, in their way, as two-fisted bullies.
For Mr. Bartlett makes it clear that Sandra and Kenneth’s relationship racks up serious casualties. And Mr. Hurt, Mr. Rosenfield and Ms. Kazan are superb in registering the damage inflicted.
Watch Mr. Hurt’s gruff, stoical Henry realizing that his girl has ditched him for his brother, with just a flicker of humiliation. Listen to Ms. Kazan’s alternately whiny and accommodating Rose deploying in vain every stratagem possible to capture her parents’ attention, or Mr. Rosenfield’s 14-year-old Jamie shutting down into numbed oblivion in the middle of a family firestorm.
Mr. Mayer (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “Spring Awakening”) shows a keen eye for the patterns of domestic dysfunction, and the sight of Kenneth and his son as startled mirror images across a dinner table is priceless.
“All we’re asking for is some humanity, is some freedom, is to throw off everything that holds us down and explore what we could do instead,” says the 19-year-old Sandra. It could be said that her wish is fulfilled, except for possibly the humanity part. Freedom, it seems, is just another word for taking care of yourself.
Mr. Bartlett isn’t about to let Sandra and Kenneth off the hook for their self-centeredness, in what is a deeply judgmental play. “There she is safe and sound, but a trail of destruction in her wake, no doubt,” says Kenneth as Sandra arrives late from a pub for a family conference. “That about sums her up.” There’s warmth and admiration in his voice, though, and watching Ms. Ryan and Mr. Armitage, we may even share his feelings, despite ourselves.