Aspects of Love (1989) has never been one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s biggest hits, even though it contains some lush and beautiful music, including the hugely popular Love Changes Everything, the song that launched Michael Ball’s career.
I’ve always had a considerable soft spot for the piece, with its range of highly appealing musical motifs, although it must be said that this production isn’t a patch on Trevor Nunn’s thrillingly intimate version for the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2010.
Cynics might sneer and say that this is a Bloomsbury Group-style melodrama set to music, as it details the romantic entanglements of a closely knit group of artistic sorts. Yet the Bloomsbury echoes shouldn’t surprise. It is, after all, based on the 1955 novel by David Garnett, a man who married the daughter of his former lover, Duncan Grant.
We start in France in 1947, where 17-year-old Alex (Felix Mosse, whose rather grim rendition of Love Changes Everything starts the show) is smitten with older French actress Rose (Kelly Price). They are, as that other fine song, Seeing Is Believing, has it, “a starving actress and a star-struck boy”.
Alex takes Rose to his Uncle George’s villa where, quelle surprise, George (Jerome Pradon) falls in love with Rose. Thus begins the love triangle that endures down the years, expanding later into an uneasy, even queasy, rectangle with the arrival of Rose and George’s daughter Jenny (Eleanor Walsh).
The women are more appealing and vividly characterised than the men in Jonathan O’Boyle’s production, with an outstanding central turn — while wearing some lovely costumes — from Price. Pradon makes George a rather vulpine character and fails to capture the full beauty of the vital second aspect of love, about which the show talks so movingly — that of a father for his precious only child.
Still, there’s much to admire, not least in the slick staging that guides us through a host of scenes and settings with the minimum of fuss. Aspects, then, of excellence.
Until February 9 (020 7407 0234, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk)
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