By Emma
Link: https://www.theatrclwyd.com/event/do-you-love-me-ye
Available until: Livestream on Friday 30th April at 7.30pm, available for at least three hours after the broadcast.
Do You Love Me Yet? is a really lovely idea and it’s a shame there are only two livestreams. I hope they’ll do more in the future, but the theatres involved in this will probably be too busy doing live shows for audiences. Which is definitely a good thing.
The idea, which was created by Samuel E. Taylor and Jocelyn Cox, is that two actors have a meeting on Zoom. They have never met before. They answer a series of questions, sharing memories and secrets. Most of the questions are only answered by one of the actors but at the end there are questions which they both have to answer.
It’s described as ‘an experimental generation of interpersonal closeness’ and I suppose it’s a sort of speed dating for friendships.
The one I saw was Isabel Adomakoh Young and Fiona Hampton, two young actors. They both seem to be female-identifying.
I really liked it. They both seem really lovely and they share some very personal memories and thoughts. They’re interesting and funny and they seem to enjoy each other’s humour too. I won’t say anymore about what I thought of them because they said exactly the same things about each other at the end of the video.
It’s especially interesting to find out about the things that are most important to them. It’s difficult to know if they will become close or not but I now like Isabel even more than I did before (she was in a couple of The Show Must Go Online plays and the Gate Theatre’s Letters series) and I would love to see Fiona’s work, just because she seems so lovely and I’d like to support her work.
It works really well but I don’t know if it really achieves what it sets out to do? It’s supposed to be about interpersonal relationships but there wasn’t really any conversation. It was very structured. They took it in turns to answer questions which they probably hadn’t written (and which they didn’t read out so we could only guess what the question was) and they didn’t really discuss the answers.
It would have been great to see them get involved in a proper discussion where they could respond to each other and find common ground and take the conversation in new directions. It’s good to have the questions there in case they needed a new subject but it’s quite difficult to judge the chemistry between them (not in a romantic sense!) when they’re not free to chat.
But what they did do was really lovely and I enjoyed it a
lot.
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