About Love

A and B have a son who is seven years old. They had been talking about having another child and buying a house for a long time now, but more recently, B shows very little enthusiasm for planning the future together.

For years, C and D have been trying for a child, without luck. Every treatment has failed, and now they are considering adoption.

The plane of time shifts, the stories overlap: C has an affair with B. C and D have been divorced for some time now, the marriage of B and A is on the brink, and another character, E, appears – his relationship failed a long time ago, after the little girl that he and his ex-wife had adopted, died only a few months later. But isn’t that C’s past, which forces its way into the present? Then B becomes pregnant, and C’s desire to have a child finally seems to get fulfilled. But B decides not to carry the child to term.

In About Love, Norén proves himself again as the master in dissecting human relationships. Psychological precision and broadest universality are combined into a play which is reduced to the minimum necessary: “A chamber play about the most banal of things: relationships, infertility, betrayal, somebody dies, a quarrel, so trivial that we soon forget who quarreled and why. Like in a soap opera – but without the soapsuds, without the shrill overtones of false intimacy. Naked, stripped of all senseless excuses.” (Dagens Nyheter)