If you want a run-up-to-Christmas play that entertains with feel-good humor, bright music and a heavenly, happy ending with loved-up families, look away now. “Love” by Alexander Zeldin, new debuting at London’s National Theatre, is the exact opposite.On the other hand, if you want a play that is not afraid to say something, you’ve come to the right place at the Dorfman Theatre, the National’s smallest venue.Topically, the play is set in the run-up to Christmas. The families depicted are said to be “on the lowest rung of society” and in temporary-housing hell: a dingy hostel that contains the unemployed, the sick and refugees with nowhere else to go. Sure, the characters cling to each other in desperation, but their world is relentlessly bleak and hard to take. What humor there is remains gritty and disturbing. There are 70-second silences; swearing; fights over crockery, fridge space and the shared toilet - each resident takes their own paper rolls to use it. Plus an incontinent old lady who leaves a mess over the stage that needs cleaning up.This is an uncomfortable 90 minutes with no interval, with the house lights left on for most of it. The dialogue doesn’t exactly raise the Advent spirits. A typical sample is the old mum, Barbara, telling her son: “I’m going to die.” The middle-aged son, Colin, beats back: “We are all going to f---ing die mum.” A pause before he again reassures her: “I love you, mum.” There are a lot of expressions of love and apology.This scenario is a bitter attack on the British government’s housing policies. Agree with it or no. The bureaucracy, based on true stories, is a nightmare. Dean’s family is evicted after his landlord put up the rent; in the confusion, Dean misses a job appointment and gets his family benefit slashed. Colin hopes his mother will be rehoused after getting a doctor’s letter, waits five hours for a five-minute appointment and is told abruptly that there will be no joy.The horrors of life become clear as Colin shampoos his mother’s hair with washing-up liquid and dries it with a dirty dishcloth. This is emotionally draining and so hard-hitting, much more so then when Dean’s partner Emma, in a moment of anger slaps, Colin. The big man crumples like a baby. Later, Dean is asked if he likes water. He is surviving on foodbank scraps and replies “I have to like water.” It is all he can afford.This improvised piece returns to the theme of poverty that Zeldin explored in “Beyond Caring,” about below-minimum-wage cleaners. The acting is gloriously naturalistic, especially by Janet Etuk and Luke Clarke (Emma and Dean), who also played in “Beyond Caring.” Anna Calder-Marshall and Nick Holder also make a fine double act as Barbara and Colin.This milieu has been mined to death on the London stage in works such as Anna Jordan’s “Yen,” “Herons” by Simon Stephens, and more – sometimes inarticulate, always helpless people whose worlds have been torn apart. They are trying to keep their down-to-earth calm and just about avoid the pent-up frustration and anger. “Love” goes further than others. Of all the plays this critic has seen on the London stage over more than three decades, “Love” is both one of the most darkly depressing and one of the most powerful.“Love” is at the Dorfman, National Theatre, though January 10, 2017, then at Birmingham Repertory Theatre from January 26 through February 11.
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