Great Dirty Love Story is a very simple play. All characters are complete stereotypes, which is all right if you are looking for an easy laugh. But it does make you question if that is really necessary. There are plenty of great plays out there that are hilarious and have an interesting set of characters that offer more than one characteristic at once. On top of that, all five characters coming up in the play are quite gendered. That makes it feel out of date and hard to relate. That is problematic because the story is about everyday life and should be relatable.
However, there were very promising parts to the performance as well. An amazing part was the format of the script, written by Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna. The frame dialogue around the scenes was written as a poem. That is an amazing idea and worked really well with the structure of the play. It is a shame that the story and the character development could not keep up with that. The story itself does not build up much tension and the end does not have any surprises – it ends exactly as expected and does not leave a big impression. There is no problem with predictable endings, but Dirty Great Love Story made it feel a lot like waiting too long for something that you already know will happen.
The two people cast made up of Ayesha Antoine (Katie) and Felix Scott (Richard) played five characters all together. They were great at switching characters by the minute on stage. Even though there was no costume change, there was never confusion about who said what. The acting itself was well performed. Yet again, it would have been an overall great performance if the characters were better written.
Overall, the play started off promising but unfortunately stumbled over its use of stereotypes.