For two months during the pandemic, the Australian author Trent Dalton lugged a sky blue 1960s Olivetti typewriter to a busy Brisbane street corner and invited strangers to tell him a love story. A sentimental, slightly absurd stunt – and one that could have gone very wrong. But Dalton, ever the charmer, has a way of finding the extraordinary in the everyday.
The result was Love Stories, a book brimming with intimate confessions, grand gestures and all the messy business of being human. Now, in a stage adaptation for Queensland Performing Arts Centre, adapted by Tim McGarry and directed by Sam Strong, those stories don’t just leap from the page – they explode with theatrical spectacle.
The creative team is the same that brought Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe to the stage, smashing QPAC box office records on a wave of Netflix success – and you can feel the same big energy here. Where Boy Swallows Universe was a kaleidoscopic plunge into the chaos of a Brisbane boy’s rough-and-tumble upbringing, Love Stories chooses a quieter street – before running headlong into the traffic of emotion.
McGarry’s adaptation anchors the disparate vignettes in Love Stories in a central narrative by enlarging Dalton’s own love story with his wife, Fiona Franzmann (the pair share writing credits). On stage, Jason Klarwein as “Husband” and Michala Banas as “Wife” capture the raw, unvarnished rhythms of marriage – lost wedding rings, frantic Book Week costume-making, weekends treading the aisles of Bunnings – that can so often be the enemy of romance. Their chemistry isn’t electrifying, but it is relatable, with unyielding banter that echoes less Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage than the daily grind of a shared life.
But this play isn’t just about Dalton and Franzmann. It’s a city’s worth of stories based on real life, shooting off in every direction. Renée Mulder’s set is stripped to bare essentials – a lone typewriter on an empty stage – that bids the other actors to fill the void. Craig Wilkinson’s live video feeds from an on-stage camera and towering projections do more than magnify the characters: they magnify the stakes. One moment we’re swept up in a panoramic Brisbane sky; the next we’re drawn into the intimacy of a trembling lip or a sidelong glance.
Nerida Matthaei’s lyrical choreography – wistfully performed by Hsin-Ju Ely and Jacob Watton – reveal the interiority of love, in balletic sequences where bodies express what words cannot. And sound designer Steve Francis goes heavy on the nostalgia, punctuating the production with pop anthems to remind us of younger, perhaps less cynical versions of ourselves.
Rashidi Edward entertains as Jean-Benoit, a Rwandan busker who was left for dead under a tree as a baby and now drums out rhythms on an upturned Osmocote tub in Brisbane to fund his education. As narrator, he holds the show together, while yearning for eternity with his “twin flame” ex-lover – a woman he could never live with nor without.
The hardworking ensemble turns 10 bodies into a crowd. Jeanette Cronin delivers as dry wit Helen Clark from Gunnedah who laments the two years waiting for her husband, Norm, to kiss her: “Love is a fistful of time you can’t get back,” she reflects after his death. Bryan Probets showcases remarkable range as he morphs through a parade of accents and characters: a grieving widower from Michigan; a submissive (Evil Demon Spawn Imp) infatuated with his dom (Lady Succubus She-Bitch Demon); a centenarian scientist pondering the timeless question: “What is love?”
Strong’s storytelling upends romantic tropes: on balance, men are the ones with the big ideas of love – proposing to reluctant women or, on occasion, to other men looking to settle down. The women, more often, are resisting parenthood, chasing careers, or deciding to go it alone. Sometimes they meet in the aisle, but rarely do things go as imagined. It’s not just romantic love that’s under scrutiny but also the enduring love of family – the kind that bends, amends, but rarely breaks.
One of the most powerful moments comes near the end when the Husband explains why his father was never much of a hugger. The monologue is a raw, emotional excavation of memories and small grievances that have accumulated like debris across the years. As he sifts through the emotional wreckage, arriving at his father’s grave, he finds love on the other side of pain.
Love Stories doesn’t deal in easy resolutions. It dives into the chaos of love – the joy, the pain, the laughter, the heartbreak – and comes out the other side a bit bruised, but perhaps wiser. It’s a Brisbane story, yes, but it speaks beyond that city’s borders to grab you by the heart and give it a good shake, sending you back to the streets feeling just a little more alive.
Trent Dalton’s Love Stories runs until 29 September at Queensland Performing Arts Centre, as part of Brisbane festival
