REVIEW: SECOND SUMMER OF LOVE By Emmy Happisburgh At Drayton Arms, Kensington until 6 September

‘Happisburgh’s energy and capacity to switch emotion and character rapidly are impressive ’★★★

Finding the universal in the specific is one of the harder theatrical tricks – one show set in a specific place at a particular time can simply feel dated within weeks of first performance while another can still be timely, relevant and up to the minute decades or centuries on.

Emmy Happisburgh’s self-performed Second Summer of Love pulls the trick off, fixed in Home Counties fields in the 1980s/1990s rave scene in one sense, but more deeply about anyone who, as the autumn of life and the long days of September draw in, yearns for the ambition, hope and freedom of their spring and summer years, when the whole world seemed attainable, changeable and fresh.

Happisburgh’s show is effectively a one-woman enterprise, although, apparently in response to reaction to previous productions, it’s slightly expanded to include small contributions from two other actors.

We find, on a stage bare apart from five light-able cubes (well used to create a shifting landscape of home, field, supermarket, car etc), a woman beyond age 40 in lurid “ravecersise” gear, bending, stretching, seeking to keep up with a comically perky set of instructions from an unseen instructor far too young to have been alive when ecstasy was all the rave.

This is Louise, nostalgic for some of the best years of her life, now she’s settled in Guildford (poor old Guildford, once again the easy marker of middle-class, middle-aged middle England) as a music teacher married to a headmaster and with a child whose social studies are making her censorious about recreational drug-taking.

Nice set-up, and Happisburgh’s energy and capacity to switch emotion and character rapidly are impressive, as she scrolls through (and neatly skewers) Louise’s own teenage pretensions and those of her friends, the cool kid who will before long be a Tory risk analyst for a major bank, the uncool instigator who’ll crash, burn, and live well again once rehab’s helped find a life. A sub-plot about how uninhibited raving may have prevented Louise from achieving more glamorous ambitions is deftly weaved in, even if a little more reflection or regret about what might been could add some depth.

The script neatly impales some universal themes – that every generation believes it is thinking everything for the first time and that anyone over about 25 knows nothing about anything, for example. It’s brisk, funny and, with the help of Happisburgh’s excellent performance, engaging throughout.

What it isn’t is particularly original – middle age is more boring than youth, and there you go. The addition of brief appearances by Louise’s daughter (Rosa Strudwick) and the modern incarnation of her burned-out former friend Brian (Christopher Freestone) rather highlight the oddity of Happisburgh playing an entire gallery of other characters but not these two. The play began as a one-woman show and there are clear, laudable, ambitions to expand to a fuller-cast performance, but this production perhaps falls between two stools and might work better until full-cast is possible with a single, very strong performance than with additions that feel slightly tacked on.

That said, this is brisk, funny and humane, both about specific wistfulness for what Louise calls the second summer of love and a more general anthem for lost youth. It’s touring outside London after this run, and the programme promises plans to develop further.

SECOND SUMMER OF LOVE By Emmy Happisburgh

Directed by Scott Le Crass

Drayton Arms, Kensington 2 - 6 September

Box Office: https://thedraytonarmstheatre.co.uk

Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow) and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London).