The Love Project

Burrowing into one of the Underbelly’s variously dank enclaves, we’re met by a quartet of friendly faces; relaxed, convivial, attentive. They’re sat on assorted chairs and settees. There’s a coffee table. It has some mugs and biscuits on it. Coldplay, Laura Marling and Take That’s "A Million Love Songs" fill the air – ‘the nation’s favourite love songs’, an upstage projection informs us.

It’s so cloyingly cosy, you sense a trap: an imminent life lesson dispatched by hollow thirtysomethings washed down with a glass of elderflower pressé and a cupcake.

You’d be wrong though. For this is a brand new verbatim piece from the team behind the superb, cross-city one-on-one caper, You Once Said Yes. And whilst this doesn’t burn the rulebook with quite the same fervour, The Love Project is an unfussy, ably-cut piece of real-life theatre that gently warms rather than bazookas our sensibilities.

The four actors offer 16 detached accounts of love; there’s the German lesbian, a Canada-hailing primary teacher, two manic former university acquaintances, even a toddler brother-sister pairing. Abbad, a Muslim, proffers a loopily surreal take on women and the family; atomised Londoner Kate provides painful recollections of love gone awry; and Cora and William, the couple counting 56 years of marriage, reveal a language that’s all of their own.

It’s sugary, yes, and knitted together in such a way that openly exposes the joins, but the cast embody their subjects with such obvious affection and meticulousness, that this becomes a more than diverting hour unpicking that crazy little thing called love.