I Love Thee, I Love Thee Not
★★★☆☆ Minimalist
The Speakeasy at the Royal Scots Club (Venue 241a): Tue 20 – Wed 26 Aug 2026
Review by Neil McPherson
Red Firefly’s production of I Love Thee, I Love Thee Not is billed as a Shakespeare Medley. Medley is a good description as the hour is essentially an hour of Shakespeare’s romantic “hits” – dialogues and soliloquies drawn from the full range of the Bard’s plays (not his sonnets, as a running joke makes clear).
The players – Gabriel Bird and Jenna Donoghue – are on stage throughout and their flat out, expressive performance shows remarkable passion and understanding, let alone their facility to remember and deliver such complex dialogue effectively without pause.
Gabriel Bird and Jenna Donoghue. Pic Red Firefly.
The show is unencumbered by set or props (save for one lethal looking dagger), and both players are garbed all in black with a black backdrop. This minimalism has the advantage of ensuring focus remains on the words, but has the disadvantage that it is sometimes unclear where one “hit “in the medley ends and another starts.
There is an attempt to achieve separation by a ding on a bell, but this is not consistently applied and can get confusing.
Some knowledge of Shakespeare’s canon would be an advantage to appreciate the show. The greatest hits are all here and clear – “screw your courage to the sticking post” from Lady Macbeth, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” from Juliet Capulet, Oberon’s “Ill met by Moonlight” – but it is hard to decipher where the lesser known passages are from and where they end. Notes or a programme would be helpful.
masterclass
The flyer posits the show as two thespian characters –archly named Isaac McKellan and Julie Dench – showing that a study of Shakespeare provides the secret to a happy love life and a successful relationship. This artifice doesn’t hang together and is unnecessary. What the show provides is a masterclass of some of the Bard’s best writing, well performed by Donoghue and Bird (who himself bears an uncanny resemblance to Shakespeare…).
The ending provides a clever and amusing transition from Shakespeare to a string of other, more contemporary medleys, meaning you leave with a chuckle and a smile on your face.
Running time: One hour (no interval).
The Speakeasy at the Royal Scots Club (The Speakeasy), 29-31 Abercromby Place, EH3 6QE. (Venue 241a).
Thursday 20 – Wednesday 26 August 2026.
Daily: 2.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here at EdFringe.com.
Instagram: @gabird95
Instagram: @jenna_donoghue
Jenna Donoghue and Gabriel Bird. Pic Red Firefly.
ENDS
