Second Summer of Love is the debut play from actor and teacher Emmy Happisburgh, about a former raver and now parent reminiscing about her time on the 1980s rave scene.
Happisburgh arrives onstage in a neon and black bodysuit. She is almost immediately confronted by her aggrieved teenage daughter Molly (Rosa Strudwick, her real-life daughter) who is attempting to revise drug side effects for her exams and finds her mother’s distraction frustrating. Unfortunately she’s mainly there to contribute to the framing either side of the main narrative, so she doesn’t get the stage time to develop.
Molly leaves and we are into reminiscing, sparked by Louise running into her former raver boyfriend, now married and apparently content with having left raving behind him. Happisburgh paints a picture as she plays multiple characters, showing her teen self meeting him, going to her first rave and trying ecstasy for the first time. Although the staging is made up only of half a dozen glowing cubes, the show makes good use of lighting to convey the delirious atmosphere of the raves and the transformative feeling of being part of them. It’d be fun to see more raves, not just to create more of a sense of what a significant part of her life they were, but the unusual environments they can take place in and their anti-establishment ethos.
Happisburgh is good at characterisation, anchoring the show with vitality and charisma, and the crowd laugh merrily along at the jokes. We learn that Louise was a promising singer with hopes of turning professional, but the failure of this is drawn with quite broad strokes; it would be nice to tackle this in more depth, such as how the pressure of showing such promise at something so young might’ve led to a need for an outlet. There are also references to her feeling stagnant in her marriage and career which it would have been interesting to build on, perhaps tied to the loss of purpose as her singing career failed to materialise.
A late appearance by her former friend Brian (Christopher Freestone), now a pizza delivery driver, is understatedly poignant. Freestone plays the role well, with an endearing gentle optimism.
Overall, I found both Happisburgh and the show’s concept compelling. I think it just needs a little more nuance and development, and it’ll be interesting to see what topic she tackles next as her writing career progresses.