Review: Lotty's War

Despite an earnest effort from this young company, Giuliano Crispini’s new play proves an overblown and wearying experience, a stultifying mix of high pitched emotions, weak dialogue and wandering plot-lines.

Michael Fenner’s central performance as Nazi-imposter Rolf holds the piece together, though the wayward script consistently undercuts his efforts.

Although the programme labels this a "forbidden love story", Crispini side-steps the heart of his play and fails to really grapple with the complex relationship between Fenner’s charming general and Katie Howell’s wide-eyed Lotty.

Instead, the play is weighed down by Lotty’s doomed affair with the bland but loyal Ben. The young sweethearts are fairly limp together and their sentimental scenes drag on, punctuated with empty outbursts and guilty tears.

There is undoubtedly a fierce play nestling in here, it’s just got a little lost beneath the crackling radio and rattling gun-fire.

Ultimately Lotty’s War is just a bit too much – too epic for its basic structure to contain, too dense to unravel in so little time and too heavy for these predominantly young actors to support.

Perhaps if more time had been spent developing the relationship between the conflicted general and his stubborn captive, this play might have worked; as it is, one is left as desperate as poor Lotty, for the war to end and the prisoners to be released.

2/5