How Love Is Spelt

Published Monday 4 October 2004 at 11:50 by Aleks Sierz

In London, everyone is someone else’s stranger. When 20-year-old Peta moves down from Liverpool, she tells different stories about herself to the various people she meets - cocky Joe, teacher Steven, raucous Chantelle and her concerned neighbour Marion. Only when Colin, a figure from her past, appears, can she be truly herself. Like so many other youngsters who do a runner, she realises you can’t escape your past.

Chloe Moss’s touching new play is set in Peta’s messy London flat, designed by Nathalie Gibbs. Peta’s meetings with strangers are sometimes funny, occasionally ridiculous or excruciatingly embarrassing. It may be a small-scale story but Moss tells it with accurate observation, maturity and humour. An oblique love story, the play brims with compassionate understanding.

If there are two types of classic Bush play, the storming and the quiet, this is definitely an example of the latter. Moss, whose Day in Dull Armour was a hit at the Royal Court’s Young Writers Festival in 2002, shows once again her understanding of the way we use fantasy to compensate for the disappointed hopes of real life.

Directed by Julie Anne Robinson, How Love Is Spelt has a detailed central performance by Kay Lyon, who shows Peta’s every uncomfortable thought and feeling as it crosses her attractive but vulnerable features. Good performances from the rest of the cast - Joanne Pearce as Marion, Colin Tierney as Colin, Joe Armstrong as Joe, Roger Evans as Steven and Petra Letang as Chantelle - make this an evening of quiet but emotionally true revelation.