Love Animal is a psychological Noir drama packed with love, sex, violence, addiction, and death. It questions how seemingly normal people can become twisted by love. Set to debut this month at Bats Theatre 19 to 30 January.

Love Animal is a psychological Noir drama packed with love, sex, violence, addiction, and death. It questions how seemingly normal people can become twisted by love. Set to debut this month at Bats Theatre 19 to 30 January.

Love Animal is directed by Jack O’Donnell, who formally directed Romeo and Juliet in 2007and Words Apart as part of Deaf Week in 2009. Jack is “drawn to working with scripts that explore our relationship to love and the extremes it can push us to.”

In Romeo and Juliet they die for each other’s love, and in Words Apart a woman, unable to speak sign language, falls in love with a deaf man.  Love Animal continues with the theme of love, but glimpses into a more sinister place allowing Jack to use influences from Film Noir to discover these elements.

Love Animal is written by South African born Vere Hampson-Tindale. Vere wanted to “question and understand some of the violence he saw and heard about growing up in Mozambique”  asking: “What really brings a person to the point of killing somebody or dumping their own baby?”

Joined by Jacob Faauga-Renwick the two collaborated to write a story that follows Sue, an upper-class woman, married to Edward, who falls in love with the romantic idea of working in an art gallery and the alcoholic artist owner.

Edward and Sue have been trying to make their nuclear family complete; days before the baby is due Edward begins to question his idyllic family life and the paternity of the baby. Engulfed by his twisted reality what will Edward do?

Through the story of Love Animal audiences will be able to gain some insight into the people behind the stories we might hear or read in the newspaper. In turn, the audience may gain an understanding of these events or circumstances to discover what may lead a well-to-do husband to act out his animal instincts.