State of the nation | 8 May 2012

Three clichés walk onto a stage and start telling bad jokes. Welcome to Love, Love, Love, the newish play by Mike Bartlett, playing at the Royal Court until 3rd June.

It is 1967, on the night of the first global TV show, when the Beatles sang All You Need is Love. Still reading? Here are the characters. Henry is Jimmy Porter, but 10 years out of date. His younger brother Kenneth, a self-absorbed Oxonian, has pitched camp on his sofa for the summer. Henry is planning a date with Sandra, a tarty waif, also down from Oxford. While Henry’s out buying fish and chips, Sonia and Kenny get stoned, cop-off and vow to embark on a life of adventure. Fresh, they say.

But the facts of life are little more conservative. It is 1990. Kenny and Sandra are married with two children and living in Reading – cue smug guffaws from the Chelsea audience. Both selfish by nature, they are neglectful of their children. Both selfish by nature, their marriage is collapsing. Both selfish by nature, they yearn for a fresh affair.

And so it came to pass. Kenny and Sandra divorce amicably and then drift into comfortable retirement. It’s 2011 and Rose, their daughter, has called a family reunion. She wants her parents to buy her a flat, and blames them for her struggles and her younger brother’s descent from star pupil to drug-addled depressive. Kenny and Sandra ignore their daughter’s pleas and carry on babybooming. They dance to All You Need Is Love, smooch a bit, and plan to spend their declining years together on a round the world cruise. Fresh, man.

The one thing this play is not is fresh. There are familiar attacks on Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, the mollycoddled babyboomers and the entitlement of the younger generation. Its simplistic morality is risible. Everyone and everything is at fault except for the protagonists; it’s like watching a domestic version of Question Time.

This is the season for state of the nation books and plays. Already this year, we have had John Lanchester’s dense Capital, and next month Jonathan Cape will publish Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo: State of England. Surely Amis won’t entertain Rose’s logic, encapsulated in the line: ‘You didn’t change the world, you bought it’. If the state we are in is as plain as Bartlett suggests, then we wouldn’t be in it.