Venue: PACT Centre for Emerging Artists (Erskineville NSW), Jul 19 – 28, 2018
Playwrights: Tom Hogan, Bonnie Leigh-Dodds
Directors: Tom Hogan, Bonnie Leigh-Dodds
Cast: Tom Hogan, Bonnie Leigh-Dodds
Theatre review
Love Song Dedications was a longstanding radio program featuring classic romantic pop music, alongside real life accounts of love won and love lost. Tom Hogan and Bonnie Leigh-Dodds’ show is a tribute of sorts, using a combination of triple-threat disciplines to create a work of comedy, that is ostensibly about finding the greatest love song of all time. A prominent characteristic of the radio show was its unabashed earnestness, completely devoid of irony and therefore deeply cringe-worthy, and here, Hogan and Leigh-Dodds play with that raw human openness, almost as an antidote for modern art’s obsession with being too clever, to bring focus away from the head and into the heart.
It is an exercise in honesty, of placing the authentic within the inevitable conceits of a theatre piece that must have a beginning, middle and end. Storytelling will always contain verisimilitude, but degrees of fiction seem fundamental to how things work on stage. Hogan and Leigh-Dodds are best friends, and like those on the airwaves speaking via telephones about matters of the heart, they are here to talk about their relationship. We discover how having an audience would affect this process of connection between the two. Turning a friendship into an artistic partnership could be a precarious exercise, but if art is where they communicate best, then perhaps understanding their relationship through a form like this, is their best bet.
Hogan and Leigh-Dodds are intelligent and effervescent, both youthful specimens, full of beans and big ideas. A good command of their bodies, and of space, ensures that we are held attentive for the 70-minute duration. They create a plot trajectory that is surprisingly varied, manufacturing with considerable ingenuity, a multifaceted approach for what seems a very simple point of departure. There are brief moments of energetic dissolution, but we never lose interest in the overarching project of finding that best song.
Creativity, even at its most commercial, evades objective judgement. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and for Hogan and Leigh-Dodds the best song from the 104 in their shortlist, is the one that holds the greatest amount of meaning, and of nostalgic value, to their private selves. Their love story informs their selection, but judging from the warmth radiating from the audience, the popular consensus is that their show is very well-liked indeed.
Suzy Goes See 