THE SAVAGE / LOVE OF DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA by The Stage Club

“Love, Minus The Fluff”

Reviewer: Meera Nair
Performance: 27 February 2016

Sitting in the first row, I stare at empty bottles of Corona Extra and Asahi Dry Black on the stage. The stage floor is littered with peanut shells and cigarette butts. As the audience file in, two actors are already on stage, miserably drinking their problems away.

Directed by Kamil Haque, The Savage/Love Of Danny And The Deep Blue Sea combines two separate plays, Savage/Love by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin, and Danny And The Deep Blue Sea by John Patrick Shanley, lending new meaning to each as they feed off each other. Both plays are thematically similar in exposing the jagged edges of that fluffy thing we call ‘love’.

Back in our dingy bar, which is the setting for Danny And The Deep Blue Sea, Savage/Love plays as filmed vignettes on the bar’s wall. The blue-green tinted film lends to the gritty atmosphere in the bar.

Savage/Love deals with moments in love. In this production, it is for the most part solemn, with exceptions being First Moment (sweet), Babble I, II and III (amusing), as well as Terms of Endearment (particularly touching as it is in sign language). Beggar is a key vignette here, as it marks the transition from Savage/Love into Danny And The Deep Blue Sea. Recited live in the bar by ‘Fred’ (Shivram Gopinath) as a drunken ode to a beer bottle, it is darkly amusing.

The transition is complete when Fred walks out and Danny (Ray Jones) walks in. Put this way, Danny And The Deep Blue Sea is treated as yet another vignette in Savage/Love. And savage it is. Both characters, Danny and Roberta (Marilyn White) are haunted by guilt and find redemption in each other. The violence is painful to watch. The sound of slaps makes me wince.

I found the choice of medium for these two plays to be appropriate. As a collection of moments and feelings, Savage/Love is applicable to many individual stories, and can find life across cultures, times and spaces. It is enduring in the sense that it can be revisited over and over again, even by the same person in the course of his or her life. It is like a film. In contrast, Danny And The Deep Blue Sea creates an individual story from a unique collection of moments. Like theatre, this particular story exists only for as long as it runs.

On the whole, The Savage/Love Of Danny And The Deep Blue Sea has been astute in its choice of plays. In combining existing material, it casts new light on these plays, giving us something new and different, and exposing that love isn’t that easy after all.