If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Young Vic review ★★★★★

It’s hard to know what to make of If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Starring the beloved Jane Horrocks (Little Voice, Ab Fab), the Young Vic’s new drama-gig-dance hybrid has a Northern accent and a highly polished post-punk attitude. Horrocks, in Debbie Harry get-up, careers through the songs she adored growing up. We’ve got Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Soft Cell, The Smiths, Gang of Four. Four attendant dancers interpretively, sometimes irritatingly, jerk around the stage.

Everything functions perfectly: Horrocks roars in fine New Wave fettle; the live band don’t miss a beat. The choreography is slick, though intrusice. The stage design, with its giant plug, cleverly illustrates the idea of feeling small insignificant that permeated youth culture in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but also the massive power that music had in bringing people together.

But this show just doesn’t work. For something about memory, there’s very little fondness or nostalgia in If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me. There’s no narrative, no contextualisation, no sense of what it was like be young at the time; the whole thing is far too clean. Where's the despair, the dizzying surges of passion, the escapism? For something with so much promise, this show feels, unfortunately, like an expensive vanity project.

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