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Tuesday 29 April 2014

Natalie Imbruglia In Things We Do For Love At Nottingham Theatre Royal REVIEW


It's a tale of unrequited love and requited love, illicit passion, ardent desire and secret, pervy admiration and it's into this hilariously lovable bizarre love rectangler Nineties Alan Ayckbourn revival that Neighbours legend and worldwide pop sensation the divine Natalie Imbruglia makes her stage acting debut.

Jolly hockey sticks ex-prefect and confirmed singleton Barbara - played like a magnificently perfectionist Titan by the extraordinary Claire Price - lives in the middle flat of her converted house and in a tantalising peep-show stage set up which reveals just the calf-skimming floor of the flat above and the ceiling of the basement flat below, home of lovelorn Barbara fan and DIY lackey Hamish. Into Barbara's inch perfect conversion world skips her sweetie-pie old school friend and freshly engaged Nikki - a breathlessly animated and Brit accent-perfect Natalie Imbruglia followed by Edward Bennett as hunky Scot fiancé lover-man Hamish to temporarily live in the flat above.

But brewing beneath the conversational social niceties, the tea and sherry and nibbles and nice blouses is a crazy-houseful of animal passions, let loose by Barbara's insanely disastrous dinner party, which confidentially ends up hosting possibly one of the best on-stage drunk scenes EVER by Simon Gregor as the gloriously peculiar lovesick Gilbert.

With cosy and civilised domesticity mixing dangerously with rampant lust that confidentially leads to possibly the funniest and most outrageously-choreographed on-stage lovers' fight scene EVER, this play is an acting-quartet triumph by the cast as Barbara and her heart-breakingly heart-meltingly passionate too-close-for-comfort subarban neighbours

Love, laughs, fighting and an Aussie goddess in the flesh, three curtain calls from an enraptured audience can't be wrong, there's not many things not to lurrve about the most bonkers and anarchically-romantic love story in town, fall in love with it at Nottingham Theatre Royal until this Saturday.

Things We Do For Love is at Nottingham Theatre Royal until Saturday 3rd May. Full details including ticket prices can be found on the Theatre Royal website here

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