Essays In Love
Leon Wadham
1. Alain de Botton is one of our greatest modern philosophers, so to successfully adapt his novel to the stage requires an equally great team of theatrical practitioners in their respective fields. While the critically-panned 2009 British comedy My Last Five Girlfriends is said to be based on Essays In Love, I would argue that it’s closer to the more pseudo-philosophical, egocentric High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, and bestow the honour of a true adaptation to Eli Kent and Oliver Driver, who have translated the text to allow Driver and co-director Sam Snedden to present the work in a theatrical language that the written word cannot articulate.
2. De Botton is one of my favourite authors. The Consolations of Philosophy pulled me from a spiral of self-pitying self-destruction, while How to Think More about Sex assuaged the shame of any objectively-perceived sexual perversity. Was I destined to love this show purely because of my appreciation of the author of its source material? Or was it already damned, as so many adaptations are, to not live up to the images my mind had constructed while reading Essays In Love?
3. The trick to any adaptation is to make it feel both familiar (in story) and new (in spectacle) at the same time. A box, the contents of which we already know, wrapped in a bow by a knot we’ve never seen before. There is nothing so quintessentially British in the novel as to have prevented a cultural translation, but, for readers of the book, details such as the Paris-London shuttle are significant bookends which Kent and Driver dutifully keep in. Meanwhile, a disco ball replaces a bowl of marshmallows, and, in the same way as De Botton, Kent and Driver offer us something unexpected yet immediately identifiable. Which is the success of both the book and the play. One cannot read or witness either without mirroring the narrative of their own relationship(s) – past or present – in the story of protagonist’s. From nicknames and adopted traits, to Stendhalian Teeth and Wittgenstein’s Duck-Rabbit, the elements are both specific and universal in their language of love. A language that, for whatever reason, I never heard with an accent in my head when I read the book.
4. With a Hugh Grant-esque clipped and stumbling British cadence, and ill-fitted suit, Leon Wadham is a pitiful yet endearing Otto (renamed from the novel’s self-titled narrator, Alain). While an incredibly intelligent performer, Wadham’s work in Bouffon also provides him with an authentic physical presence and immediacy with the audience, which personifies the protagonist in an unexpectedly pathetic and paranoid way that is incredibly funny, and avoids the potentially intellectual drone of the more self-assured tone of the original text.
5. The meta-theatrical shift of Alain-Otto from architect to actor, allows the autobiographical nature of the story to develop new layers, as Otto struggles to retell a story with an ending for which he hadn’t quite planned. Aided with an answering machine, visual guides, and a few chairs, Otto attempts to reconstruct the journey of his relationship with Chloe while processing his own catharsis, which allows the retrospective tense to maintain an active component.
6. While there is, in a similar vein to culture, no reason not to update the original text to a modern setting, the creative team of Rachel Marlow, Leon Radojkovic, and Ella Mizrahi capitalise on the use of early 90s technology, with projections and animations inducing laughs, wistfulness, and utter devastation. The awkward handling of an analogue machine is only funny when compared to the simplicity of voicemail, just as the emotional state of another in heartache can be, when the spectator is removed from the experience. Words on the page have their power, but to see them play out across a projection screen for all to see, when we know their syntactic destination, can bring an entire room of people to silence.
7. In total, Otto asks four questions of the audience throughout the play, but it is the first and last that elicit a unanimous raising of hands. De Botton wrote that he “believes that art is there to help us make us feel less lonely”, and while theatre provides a communal experience for the audience, I couldn’t help but feel completely and utterly alone in the last of these primary school/union meeting gestures. Because the memory of love, and, even more so, the loss of it, is relationship weight that time has not yet allowed me to emotionally unsaddle, and as much as we had in common, no one in that room knew what was going on in my head, or my heart, at that moment.
8. If you’re single, a play about love leaves you either optimistic or pessimistic depending on your current state of mind. If you’re in a relationship, the same is true. Either way, Essays In Love provides an opportunity to reflect on that most indefinable, often elusive, and always complicated thing called love in a truly original and unique production.