DOUG Lucie, it seems, has come full circle. The writer who in his time has been the fiercest chronicler and critic of modern modes and manners, has finally turned his sights on girl-power and the modern female - and it is not a pretty sight. It may well, though, warm the cockles of any male heart which has recently thought the feminist pendulum and modern society in general has swung too far in the wrong direction.
Feckless, fecund, and an incorrigible liar to boot, Lucie's Shelley is, as her best friend Ros says, someone ''who lives in her own world, according to her own rules''. She sees what she wants and takes it.
Utterly without scruple - and played by Susannah Doyle like a preying mantis hiding her ruthlessness under a skin of messy insouciance - Lucie's very bitter, often scabrous, nineties sexual comedy sets up Shelley ultimately as the reproductive monster from hell. ''You are an obscenity,'' shrieks Sam Graham's Mick, her erstwhile boyfriend and father of her first child.
In this scenario, men are the undoubted losers whether they be, like Ros's other half Jim, laddishly unreconstructed or like Mick, an ageing musician-hippy. Then again, set between 1992 and last year's General Election, Lucie seems also to wish to show just how critical male-female relationships have become.
Love You, Too presents the darkest of reflections on personal relationships at the end of the twentieth century in which all are suffering but for which, Lucie makes plain, modern woman must be held mainly responsible.
Cruel, stinging, and partisan, Mike Bradwell's modish, neon-strip production is a terrific piece of theatre. But Lucie couldn't expect me to agree with his analysis, now, could he?
n Love You, Too is at the Bush through June.
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