The Dark Side of Love at The Roundhouse

The Dark Side of Love at The Roundhouse

28 June, 2012
by: Naima Khan

Cynics steer clear. This is one for the romantics among us. 

“I loved you once!” shouts a vague figure I can see through a split in the fabric covering her hiding place at The Roundhouse. She's talking to herself of course, like most of Shakespeare's bat-crazy teens in love. But for a brief moment I feel drawn into her turmoil. She could be anyone from Hamlet, Othello, or Romeo and Juliet and my view of her in the hellish vision of emotional disaster that is The Dark Side of Love, is effectively brief. 

In this promenade production, you're left to explore a world of heartbreak and as an exasperated Hamlet asks “why don't we all want to kill ourselves?” you decide, right there and then, how much of a romantic you are. This is the aspect of Shakespeare that director Renato Rocha pulls apart for exposure with his young cast. I worry cynics won't get much out of it and I worry I'm one of them.

Rocha has his young men and women dress in bloodied black and white. They could be a gang from '30s New York or just kids in school uniform and they are literally climbing the walls, driven mad by the confusion, the intensity and the overwhelming nature of love. Treading carefully through a circular tunnel, someone asks me what love is from behind a gas mask as Ophelia's face drowns in a bucket near my feet, in a projection behind me and on a wall way ahead of me. It's beautiful in a depressing sort of way. 

But then we're guided – seamlessly by a skilled cast – into a club with multiple entrances where Romeo and his boys talk about bitches and feelings and shagging and love and it's surprisingly sweet and expectedly childish. This is all before a stream of dance, poetry, singing and acrobatics carve paths through the gathered audience and  wraps itself around us. Amidst this choreographed chaos leaked from Shakespeare's scripts is a girl who walks quite calmly through it all reciting Shakespeare in Portuguese providing, for me, another slim moment in which I feel connected to Shakespeare's heady hyperbole.  

While most of the cast present alluring physical representations of the delirium in Shakespeare's romantic scenes, she presents Shakespeare via a different, increasingly seductive sound that I don't fully understand.  

The Dark Side of Love is clever, beautiful and gross and definitely worth seeing. But you really do have to be a romantic to get the force of the emotional impact this show attempts to deliver. 


The Dark Side of Love, part of World Shakespeare Festival and LIFT runs at The Roundhouse until 8th July. 


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Naima Khan