No Love Songs Review: Why So Many Love Songs?
I truly had no idea what to expect from the brand-new Foundry Theatre’s first musical production: No Love Songs, a two-hander starring Keegan Joyce (Rake, Please Like Me) and Lucy Maunder (Chicago, Mary Poppins), touts itself as simply a modern love-story. Its reality is much more complex.
Based on a true story, the musical follows brand-new parents Jessie and Lana through the first few months of their baby’s life. Jessie, a musician in a band, books gig after gig to support Lana and their son. Lana, a university student turned full-time mum, finds herself unable to return to her studies after giving birth and continues to stay home with the baby. When Jessie books an American tour, Lana and the baby are left alone in Newcastle, where Lana becomes increasingly isolated and overwhelmed, unable to explain to Jessie that she’s struggling. At the show’s peak, Lana makes an unsuccessful suicide attempt, and we watch the fallout as she and Jessie recover.
To No Love Songs’s credit, its story is one that doesn’t get told enough. Postpartum depression often isn’t portrayed or discussed, both in real life and on stage, and this lack of visibility contributes heavily to Lana’s feelings of isolation and insufficiency. The love story between Jessie and Lana is very much secondary to, or at least inextricable from, the story of Lana’s mental health.
The show’s book, written by Lana’s real-life counterpart Laura Wilde with Johnny McKnight, pulls no punches — it is raw, honest, and realistic, if a little trite at times. Its confessional-style dialogue gives us a deep understanding of Lana’s struggles. That being said, its juxtaposition of Jessie and Lana’s experiences during Jessie’s time away makes Jessie incredibly difficult to like and their happy ending consequentially unsatisfying.
Maunder embodies Lana with incredible heart and sensitivity, expertly navigating the tender balance between the show’s humor and emotion. Alongside her as Jessie, Joyce is real and down-to-earth, reminding the audience that despite his unlikeability he’s (mostly) just a person trying his best in a complex situation.
The show’s music, however, tells a different story. No Love Songs is a jukebox musical based on an album written for Wilde by Kyle Falconer, the real Jessie. The lyrics are frequently clunky, the melodies and instrumentation uninspired, and the emotional tone mismatched to the book. I felt that many of the songs were unnecessary, poorly placed, did nothing to further the plot or characterisation, and made it even harder to like Jessie’s character. The last thing I wanted to hear as Lana woke up in hospital following her suicide attempt was a self-centred song from Jessie about what he wanted from her. The strong points of the storytelling were completely undermined by songs which were unhelpful, irrelevant and sometimes downright insensitive.
A story that could have been a necessary exploration of Lana’s incredibly common experience was turned at random points into a story about Jessie’s ego. Lyrics written by Falconer were put into Lana’s mouth in ways that at best repeated and at worst contradicted the sentiment of her spoken lines. Almost every song in the musical made me progressively more convinced that No Love Songs would have been much better executed as a straight play.
This brings us to perhaps the most glaring issue with the show: at every turn, the important and honest story being told by Wilde is obscured or glossed over by other aspects of the production. As mentioned earlier, the marketing is vague about the true content of the show, likely in a bid for palatability. You have to look closely to understand what it is you’re buying tickets to, with the show’s official synopsis massively downplaying the extent of Lana’s struggles. In a dangerous decision that has since been amended, the production initially chose to not even give content warnings.
On stage, the character of Lana states that one in five mothers experience postpartum depression, her struggles (Wilde’s real-life struggles) exacerbated by not knowing that she wasn’t the only one. Why is the production so hesitant to discuss its content? I truly believe it would draw in and deeply connect with an audience who have been waiting to hear stories like this if No Love Songs genuinely highlighted and valued Lana-slash-Wilde’s experience above all. As it stands, its reliance on Falconer’s name and its cliché taglines about modern love and playlists of our lives come off as overdone, opaque, and uninteresting.
Ultimately, despite Joyce and Maunder’s powerful and commendable performances, No Love Songs’s handling of its story is unsatisfying, needlessly upsetting, and confusing. I look forward to the day when such a major theatrical work represents this serious topic with sensitivity and understanding, and with a genuine focus on women’s experiences.
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