“We don’t know what love will have us do, until we are engulfed by it” follows the title on the programme of this one-hour long drama, in which the two words of the title encapsulate everything the play explores.

Told in fractured scenes, some in flashback, some in the characters’ fevered imaginations, and often underlined with ominous electronic music and dark red lighting effects, Love Animal begins dramatically with a brief scene that lets us know exactly what is going to happen at the end.

The volatile, often irrational, and generally unlikeable Felix, whose art gallery is going to the dogs (he tells one of his artists he has no talent over the phone) seduces, in “one night of bliss” as he describes it, the happily married Sue who has rescued him and his gallery from financial ruin.

She becomes pregnant and her husband, a decent, straightforward, businessman, Edward, is unaware of the affair until a letter to his wife from the hospital reveals that she has been trying to determine who the father might be.

Love, as Felix says in the central speech of the play, is amongst other things Pandora’s Box, gold and a strong addiction, but like Othello, but with more evidence than a lost handkerchief, Edward discovers that when he no longer loves Sue, chaos is come again and an ungovernable passion sweeps over him.

Vere Hampson-Tindale as Edward, Jacob Faauga-Renwick as Felix and Josephine O’Sullivan as Sue under the direction of Jack O’Donnell are able to fire the dramatic tension only intermittently owing to the brevity of the scenes and the continual jumping back and forth from gallery to home to office and the hospital. But on a couple of occasions when it does catch fire Love Animal burns brightly.
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I picked the plot from the publicity blurb: “In a few days Susan will have a baby. Edward is wondering what his wife is hiding from him. Felix just doesn’t care.” Noting that Felix was played by Jacob Faauga-Renwick helped me guess the guts, given his ethnicity is significantly different from Vere Hampson-Tindale (Edward) and Josephine O’Sullivan (Sue). 

Not that predictability is bad per se. We all know what’s going to happen in the classics and certain genres set up specific expectations. It’s how it unfolds through complications, the negotiation of obstacles and the subverting of audience expectations that determines how well a given play works. And all this requires characters of substance who arise from a text that explores its themes in ways that enrich our insights into the human condition while distracting us from the mechanics of the plot.

Written by Vere Hampson-Tindale and Jacob Faauga-Renwick, Love Animal’s non-linear plot structure works well and its central thematic proposition – “We don’t know what love will have us do, until we are engulfed by it” – may be as old as drama itself but that’s fine: every generation needs to rediscover such things anew.

What is lacking is a depth of character behaviour that convinces us these people have wants, needs and intentions beyond the immediate needs of the plot. In the process of pinpointing ‘Who’s the father?’ within this eternal triangle, and exploring the different human responses, the play needs to dramatise more subtle and true-to-life coping strategies for avoiding, confronting and dealing with the manifestations of, and impediments to, love.  

We are indeed complex and contradictory creatures when it comes to love, and this play is crying out to have that realised. At the very least we should discover what each character’s life plan is, how the pregnancy impacts on that and what changes for each of them – and between each pairing – once the actual birth occurs.

Given a series of very short scenes that give few opportunities to consolidate the characters and develop their relationships, director Jack O’Donnell keeps the action moving and paces it well. Josephine O’Sullivan offers a credible Sue, Hampson-Tindale’s often absent husband Edward is also well centred, and Faauga-Renwick’s Felix is effectively volatile and unpredictable.

Making babies real on stage is always a challenge and this bundle is barely endowed with anything approximating life, let alone love. As it stands, the action plays out like a performed synopsis of the contemporary equivalent of a minor Greek or Jacobean tragedy, yet to be made flesh. The vital signs are there but this Love Animal has yet to grow mature enough to live and breathe as a credible and interesting creature.
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