01 November 2011
Three years after the death of his wife, Michael gets a shock. Just a pair of legs on a bus but it's enough to unlock long-buried desires. Suddenly he wants to know: What is love? Is it wrong to buy sex? Is marriage the best answer? And why does the Hormonic Jazz Band always prevail?Robert Gillespie's bold, funny playLove, Question Markexplores our fidelity to the notion of monogamy, contemplating the curious gap between what we say we want and what we actually do, and posing provocative questions about sexuality and old age.
Answers should be emailed to: info*at*artsquarter.co.uk by 11pm Thursday 3rd November. Winners will be notified by email on Friday 4th November.
01 November 2011
Robert Gillespie is being interviewed today at 12.30 by Radio Gorgeous on all things Love, Question Mark http://www.mixcloud.com/radio_gorgeous/
25 October 2011
To watch an interview with Robert Gillespie, writer and director of Love, Question Mark
With thanks to Greg Jameson and the team at
20 October 2011
Love, Question Mark is playing it's second London run and we're thrilled to say that Entertainment Focus came along to review us on our opening night at The Courtyard and, in addition to a glowing review, gave us 4 Stars. Some extracts of their review can be found below:
"Gillespie crafts a rewarding emotional journey for both of his characters that cements in his exploration of love a readily identifiable core."
"..plenty of wonderful one-liners....often laugh-out-loud funny; though in Brechtian style there are moments of humour that leave you questioning your taste and morals"
"If you go in for straightforward and predictable, then Love, Question Mark which successfully and unapologetically challenges ideals of love through lively and inventive theatre, might prove too richly brewed for your blood.
"The theme proves to be one ideally explored in the theatre, and precisely what the stage is for. Love, Question Mark probes the nature of sexual relationships with wit, honesty and raw emotion....It's the kind of play that leaves its ideas reverberating in your head for some time afterwards..."
To read the full review, please click here
Why Love…?
RG. My mother was enormous fun (mostly) and very sharp and she taught me a lot about being in society; about being with people… and how that worked…
But some areas were totally neglected (almost).
She never raised the subject of my mating prospects. As a romantic who expected some engineer (that's what she told me) to climb up to her room and rescue her from the marriage she actually made, she said only oblique things, in a knowing way, about boy-friends and about girl-friends and stopped there.
After decades of observation - and a certain amount of personal experience - I ended up siding with James Joyce: "I am nauseated by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and spiritual love and love for ever."
My parents' marriage was a wonderful study. Of two perfectly decent people getting on well enough to stick it out together for fifty years… enough flame to make four kids (one died, but the intention was there) but also ripping bits off each (especially my ma off my dad, at the end) for as long as I could remember. She should have been with a dominant, dashing 'you recline there looking gorgeous while I fix everything, darling' sort of bloke and he should have been with a sweet 'don't worry - nobody gets anything right the first time' sort of woman. They should have split after, say ten, fifteen years… but they didn't.
Yet SOCIETY - still - seems to want us to aspire to a stick-together-for-life-and-don't-stray model for our person to person conduct. Why? Where does this aspiration to monogamy come from? at my daughter's school almost every parent we knew was on number two if not number three marriage, and never mind what else was going on! And yet this model still floats around and clings to us and makes us feel we're failing, or are bad people or unlucky. political parties still go for it. Bishops and their holy folk followers bang the drum about it - in spite of what they actually get up to in their private lives. I can't even remember how far back i first started to think, 'marriage - how absurd'. Why do people get together anyway… to run a business, for safety net sex, to show off…? It seemed to me that bonding with another human was a matter of personal choice and luck - not a public spectacle.THAT, you've got to write about, surely?