There’s battle lines being drawn, as the Buffalo Springfield noted more than 40 years ago.  The conflict between young and old is over Simon Stephens’ Three Kingdoms, whose reviews will be reprinted next issue, so I shouldn’t pre-empt them by commenting here.  The left/right fault line runs through the coverage of Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love on its revival for the main stage of the Royal Court.  Or, in fact, it doesn’t, and that’s worthy of comment in itself.  For not one reviewer challenges or even questions the play’s apparent perspective of indicting the baby-boom generation as the engine of its children’s woes.  Sarah Hemming comes closest with her observation that the play “demonstrates […] how every generation simplifies the faults of the previous one”.  Now, it might be that simply recording daughter Rose’s demand to be bought a house contains an implicit comment on the absurd arrogance of such a stance, but I don’t think so, because I think we now live in a world where Rose’s position has been not just legitimised but exalted.  And I don’t think it’s the baby boomers who did that; I think it’s the generation before them (all right, before us; as a womb-of-’63 graduate, I’m a fag-end boomer myself) who remade the world in terms of personal acquisitiveness rather than communitarianism; all the boomers did was obey those declarations.  But you know my views on that subject already, too…

It seems to me that Bartlett’s play demonstrates another increasing phenomenon of the past 30 years or so: not just an assumption that one view is the right one, but that it is the only one.  This is the kind of astigmatism that informed, for instance, Francis Fukuyama’s The End Of History… and we now know how that theory worked out in the event.  As I said in my review of Love, Love, Love on last year’s tour, “It is audacious to confront these ageing children of the Sixties by asserting that actually it is all about money: the money their generation enjoyed, continued to enjoy and are not now passing on.  But when the point has been prepared by a clutch of so cartoonishly broad characterisations, its potential genuine substance is fatally undermined.”  Bartlett seems to show no awareness that a case needs to be made.  And, in keeping with Sarah Hemming’s insight, let’s not forget the next line of Buffalo Springfield’s "For What It’s Worth": “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”
   
Written for Theatre Record.