Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Adam Davies, Eleni Edipidi, Jennifer Essex, Ross McCall, Caroline Ryder (voice)
Love is a many splendid thing – it can make the soul rise higher than thought imaginable, it can bring a person down to their knees as the situation of their plight becomes untenable. It can fill the heart with infatuation to the point where boundaries are cross, it can shelter and care for another with absolute clarity. Love takes all that you have and leaves you cold and distant, it makes the world seem a brighter and more approachable place, whatever the outcome, no matter who cupid’s arrow’s decided to strike within, whoever you fall in love with, nobody understands the turmoil and feeling of power you feel at that moment, That’s Amore after all.
From the primordial soup, humanity has grasped the urge to make love and war in equal measure and whilst there may be a great many songs about the futility of war and the consequences of a single action, there are a million times more about the unfathomable nature of the muscle that drives to distraction.
Combining both element of the rhythmic and entrancing dance and the endearing mystery of the pop song and power ballad, Adam Davies, Eleni Edipidi, Jennifer Essex and Ross McCall perform with structured abandon and give quite possibly the clearest, certainly most succinct version of what love truly is. The mystery of what drives us on is complex, without rules that ever stay the same and without compulsion to pull the rug away at a moment’s notice as lust plays its tricky hand.
For Tmesis Theatre, the cast, and for Elinor Randle in particular, That’s Amore must be seen as personal triumphs. The true nature of physical theatre expanded to host four extremely greatly talented performers but with that undisguised Ms. Randle touch that enhances movement and shows generous abundance of feeling; is the heart captured in the smallest details, the merest flick of a wrist or gestured eyebrow raised to the best of music inspired by love’s great adventure and soul damning heartbreak that makes That’s Amore such an adorable show.
Like Tmesis Theatre’s production of Wolf Red, in which Ms. Randle gave one of the most sublime performances of the year in, That’s Amore is gargantuan in its outlook and positively pulls the brains behind physical theatre in a direction that is free spirited, keen-eyed and honest. It makes an hour feel, in the best way possible, like an eternity in which you can never tire of, of being in love.
Ian D. Hall