Simon Ward reviews Big Love at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre

This is the final play in the Lion and Unicorn’s Here | For 2026 season, this time written and directed by the venue’s Artistic Director David Brady. It is a one man show, with Samuel Warren playing ‘Sam’ and Brady himself providing technical support and a bit of offstage banter. Warren is full of charm and warmth, even offering sweets to the Halloween audience on the evening I attended. This is a chatty and fun performance which quickly wins the audience over, and warms us up to a certain amount of audience participation. This is a piece of meta-theatre, which knows it is taking place in a black box theatre above a gastro-pub in Kentish Town. It is theatre with the mechanism showing – when Sam raises his finger there will be a gear shift with the lights and sound. There is an open-hearted honesty to the whole show. That is reflected too in a simple set consisting of a raised central platform, a floor strewn with confetti and two small tables in each corner, one containing an old-fashioned red telephone and one a big red button marked ‘Do Not Push’. We have learned from Chekhov that before the evening is over that the button will be pushed and the phone will be answered.

Brady’s theme, as the title suggests, is love, and what it really means. It is a meditation on the ways we look for love. Sam is brimming with ideas of what it might be. The final element of the set design is a pinboard covered with brightly coloured cards. We discover that these are the ideas that other audiences have shared about people or things that they love. Because of course there are as many different definitions and ideas about love and life as there are people, in fact even more because we are all constantly changing our minds. When Sam thinks of himself as at his most passionately intense on a dancefloor in a faraway holiday destination the chances of that actually leading anywhere are basically nil. So how is he ever to find the ‘big love’ that he is yearning for?

The lesson that the play teaches us is that, despite what we have been led to believe by so much music, art and literature, love comes not from not grand romantic gestures but the tiniest things. These are the things that might seem insignificant but which actually encapsulate someone’s essence in our minds. The whole evening is a dialogue between the large and grandiose and the smallest details. Warren’s performance, too, moves between an expansive generosity, to passionate intensity, to a quieter, more meditative tranquillity. This is a funny piece which manages to send itself up while also taking itself seriously, a difficult feat. And, in the end, it is genuinely touching, a moving tribute to the reality of love in all its rich variety.

Big Love is running at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre, 42-44 Gaisford St, London NW5 2ED until Saturday 7th November