As Valentine’s Day 2025 approaches, the National Theatre has compiled a list of its own productions in order to showcase various forms of love as shown on stage. I’ve put together a selection of the best to see what 5 completely separate productions make of love.
Romeo and Juliet
First, and to some of you least, comes the enormous, Shakespearean elephant in the room. Romeo and Juliet must have had thousands of incarnations over the centuries, and surely a special mention on a million Valentine’s Day lists. But I’m powerless to resist its indomitable appeal.
This iteration is the National Theatre’s first real film, made aesthetically beautiful by its use of rehearsal spaces and backstage and initially a response to Covid-19 restrictions. It’s also heavily streamlined, cut down to just an hour and a half.
The almost dreamlike quality to sequences like the Capulet ball, and the persistent chemistry between a traditionally mopey Romeo (Josh O’Connor) and a quietly fervent Juliet (Jessie Buckley) give the innocent infatuation an adolescent intensity. The simplicity of the overall product is its greatest strength: far from a self-conscious effort towards complete modernity, this feels like a Romeo and Juliet elegantly fine tuned.
Blues for an Alabama Sky
With that out of the way, let’s move a few hundred years forward. Next is the beautifully designed, Tennessee Williams-esque Blues for an Alabama Sky. Written in the early 90s by Pearl Cleage, and revived in 2023 by Lynette Linton, the play takes Harlem at the tail end of its renaissance as its setting to tell a love story that only causes pain to everyone involved.
Angel (Samira Wiley) is a showgirl, accustomed and committed to a brilliantly modern lifestyle. But she’s willing to sacrifice it – and her daring, revolutionary friends – for the company of a man. It’s a story that’s not alien to any of us, only the consequences of insupportable loneliness. Angel’s affair invites the audience to question what, or who we might sacrifice for the chance to be loved.
Of course, for Angel, there is also the reality of her time, and the practical and social security that having a man could provide. Her affair with the Alabama gentleman Leland Cunningham is convulsive and spasmodic, sickening in the way its gravity draws her in. A second romance, gently blooming between sweet-natured family planning campaigner Delia (Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo) and the good-times-loving doctor Sam (Sule Rimi), is a soothing balm to its more explosive counterpart.
Nevertheless, the play is ultimately a tragedy. That’s no reason to consider it unromantic, but it’s not an example most couples will want to follow.
The Hot Wing King
Number three is Katori Hall’s 2020 kitchen sink The Hot Wing King. It’s Memphis, Tennessee in the heat of summer and, in a set that’s 90s sitcom-cozy, Cordell (Kadiff Kirwarn) is prepping for the annual Hot Wings contest. A small but explosively fun cast is comprised of Cordell’s partner Dwayne (Simon Anthony-Rhoden), their friends Isom (Olisa Odele) and Big Charles (Jason Barnett), Dwayne’s wayward nephew EJ (Kaireece Denton), and EJ’s non-committal dad, TJ (Dwayne Walcott).
The stressful pressure chamber of competition preparation proves a recipe for conflict as the characters’ long-held tensions begin to bubble over. Cordell and Dwayne’s relationship is the play’s centre of gravity; Kadiff Kirwan and Simon-Anthony Rhoden give the characters a real sense of familiarity with one another and make for a grounded depiction of well-established domestic devotion.
Weaving between saccharine doting and heartfelt arguments with ease, the play paints a brilliantly vivid portrait of the reality of life in love: two adults desperately trying to balance the endless work of their individual lives – the strain and effort made double by their lives as queer Black men – with their inarguable devotion to one another.
Maybe it’s no spring rom-com, but Hot Wing King is an achingly, realistically romantic slice of a life with a love that many of us can only dream of.
The Effect
Four, The Effect, is a tidal wave of a play. First performed in 2012, Lucy Pebble’s short psychodrama is set within the clinical trials of a new antidepressant, observed and commented on by two psychiatrists (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Michele Austin). Connie (Taylor Russel) and Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) are, to begin with, complete strangers; but while trapped together for 5 weeks they begin to foster an all-consuming passion for one another.
The ever-present question is whether or not their feelings are ‘real’. Within the sterilely plain and blinding white of the set, the idea of love becomes a dispute of faith. There is the choice believe, as Connie does, that attraction and sentiment is purely chemical and manufactured or to believe in some abstract higher ideal.
In the modern world, where pathologisation is one of the trendiest hobbies of the last few years, it seems a pertinent topic to revisit. And yet, the play does not leave us with a single conclusion of doubt. There are moments of entirely organic connection and understanding, and we are left only with confusion.
Whatever the fundamental answer is, we must all find a way to cope, just as the play’s characters are forced to. The only thing that any of us can be sure of is our own ability to make the best of things.
Present Laughter
In last place, Present Laughter is not, I admit, really a romance play; it’s a brilliantly funny Noël Coward comedy. It is about love, but mostly the kind found in a mirror. It’s really a play about fame, the horror and exhaustion of it, but mostly its overwhelming narcissism brought to wild and magnificent colour.
Within that world of hyperbole, love affairs burn as brightly and as quickly as meteors and are made all the more exciting by the glamourous, glitzy, gossipy world of high-class theatre. Garry Essendine, played by the ever-dazzling Andrew Scott, is a man who is not quite able to separate his personhood from his stage masks.
He is constantly suspected of pretence and unable to settle into any sort of respectability in his middle age. He drives his friends to madness, though they are hardly better, and parades his long trail of abandoned admirers like a particularly fashionable dressing gown.
The catch is, however, the inevitable consequence of a life lived in earnest theatrics. Each affair of the heart seems genuine emotion behind it, for Garry at least. At the end of the play, the audience can only wonder if perhaps his constant romances were a form of genuine pleasure, some sort of honest enjoyment.
As mentioned, there is no central romance – but then again it’s Valentine’s Day, and couple fatigue is a real thing. There has to be something left for the rest of us, even here. This is undeniably a play about love, just the sort that comes and goes.
Despite my own focus in this article on romance, each of these plays is really more of an ensemble piece. In a way, love proves to be its own worst enemy. The romantic, platonic, or familial manifestations clash over and over, forcing people to make selfish or self-sacrificing choices as the case may be.
The continuing theme seems only to be proving how fragile the connections that structure our lives can be, dependant wholly on our own decisions. All we can do is cling to the finite moments of happiness we get and try not to get too much wrong. This is, of course, a very theatrical conclusion to reach, but surely all the world’s a stage.
