Love shapes our lives. The act of love creates us, our choice of partner binds us, the force of attraction moves us, self-respect sustains us.  Up and coming local theatre company Twisted Willow Theatre explores love in Cambridge today using the wisdom of the ancient Greeks in its unique new play Seven Words for Love coming to Corpus Playroom from Tuesday 26th until Saturday 30th May.

Artistic Director Richard McNally selected seven local writers and assigned them each one of the many Greek words for love  - agape (love of humanity), storge (love of family), pragma (enduring love), philautia (self-respect), philia (shared experience, or brotherly love), ludus (playful, flirtatious love), and eros (erotic love). Each writer in their act was challenged to demonstrate the specific, separate quality of their type of love.

These seven acts were interwoven in a collaborative devising process. The writers and McNally worked initially with actors improvising scenes. Inspired by the sparks in those scenes, they created a common pool of characters that were both local and current.  Their stories were then painstakingly strung together. This unique process formed a unique play.  In Seven Words For Love every scene both embodies a timeless type of love, and also reveals a part of these character’s stories. The result is particular to Cambridge but universal in its appeal.

"I wanted to see what an Ancient Greek perspective on love could teach us about modern life and modern relationships", explains director Richard McNally. "I like the idea that, as in much ancient theatre and philosophy, these emotions transcend the limits of time and unify us in our experiences of the many nuanced faces of the human condition; unaffected by social change and fundamentally primal".

"It was a rewarding process with a fascinating result. Each writer in their scene shows their type of love in her or his own theatrical style, but we also each tell part of a compelling narrative", adds writer Rachel Mariner. "The atmosphere was stimulating and supportive and the material was challenging. We were mining, digging down to understand the heart of our Greek word for love, and the heart of these characters."

In Seven Words for Love, the audience will see whether the pragma of a long-term couple can survive when one has become carer for the other. They will see whether a raucous family’s unconditional storge can fend off destructive eros. They will discover the surprising power of flirtatiousness - ludus.  In a moving scene, one woman finds out if the mindfulness she teaches to foster philautia can give her the strength to survive a silent crisis. The tapestry is completed in a moment of shared experience – philia.

A cast of eleven talented local actors bring this story to the Corpus Playroom stage from Tuesday 26th May until Saturday 30th May at 7.45pm. Don't miss out on your opportunity to see an entirely original piece of compelling theatre.

Tickets available from the Corpus Playroom website.