Play: Love Is So Simple

A tragicomic, behind-closed-doors drama—unprecedented in France—that is both twilight-like and electrifying, moving us deeply and hitting the mark every time. Make way for theater within theater, on opening night in Stockholm, when “humor is bloody and love is dark!” Alma (Bérangère Warluzel) and Robert (Charles Berling), a couple both on and off stage, invite their actress friend (Caroline Proust) and her psychologist husband (Alain Fromager) to continue the party at their home. But with alcohol fueling the atmosphere, the friendly evening quickly turns into a settling of scores, and the great unmasking begins—fueled by their disillusionments, regrets, frustrations, jealousies, and a thousand other wounds. In Lars Norén’s play, the art of dialogue reaches its peak; with a mix of scathing barbs and humorous retorts, it delights the quartet of actors—whose performances are astonishingly spot-on —ready to tear into one another with full force in a devious game of cat and mouse where each watches, attacks, manipulates, hurts the other, or protects themselves… The masks fall as the night’s verbal battle rages on, revealing “a contemporary portrait of human nature of rare insight.”