Brighton Fringe 2026
The Love We Think We Deserve
Anna Bontovics, Wallflower Theatre Company,The Lantern Theatre, Brighton, LIPA (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts)
Genre: Biographical Drama, Contemporary, Costume, Dark Comedy, European Theatre, Experimental, Feminist Theatre, International, LGBTQIA+, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Show, Theatre, Theatrical Storytelling, Translation
Venue: The Lantern Theatre Studio, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
Budapest and Liverpool LIPA graduate Anna Bontovics has wrought from personal experience something affirmative beyond the buzz of a new stigma to caution people against people diagnosed. The Love We Think We Deserve plays just two days at the Lantern till May 19 before touring; first to Camden People’s Theatre.
It could grow into something both exceptional and even more necessary.
Review
BPD? There’s two plays with this acronym hovering like a stigma. Borderline Personality Disorder, itself banned from the title. Budapest and Liverpool LIPA graduate Anna Bontovics (and Wallflower Theatre Company) has wrought from personal experience something affirmative beyond the buzz of a new stigma to caution people against people diagnosed. The Love We Think We Deserve plays just two days at the Lantern till May 19 before touring; first to Camden People’s Theatre. “Why, use us after our desserts and who’d ‘scape whipping?” as Hamlet says defending actors.
Here though, who says people deserve stigmatising? The metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell wrote to his nephew in 1676. “It is as if one had to dissect oneself, and read the anatomy lesson.” But people still need the lesson.
Anna Bontovics also performs their own 75-minute piece is one of those who fearlessly anatomises themself, but brings to it an energy that’s both informative and universalising. The first night was disrupted with the non-arrival of carefully-placed props, and audience participation is mandatory and makes the show fizz. Bontovics has also prepared their own voiceovers and other pre-recorded material, various playlister tracks and a range of sound effects. These with the lighting are complex and sequences by the Lantern’s Erin Buckridge.
The pre-sets are aeries of boxes with Hungarian labels, that alas can make no sense to an English-speaking audience. Bontovics is idiomatically fluent in English, so this must come down to a personal choice. It’s even more intriguing since at a alter moment the audience are offered – well importuned – to take a large laminated word and place it near the box they choose. Some fit, we find, some don’t. I’m not quite sure of the meaning of this. Like many moments it has a metaphoric reach that doesn’t quite reach the audience. The linguistic point might be what gets lost in translation. But before this point Bontovics herself narrates, sings and allows a conversation between a prepared self and another voice altogether, for their stage self to respond. Synching is excellent and lighting and other cues go off at least tonight, as they should, without hitches.
What Bontovics attempts is a life steeped in metaphor for a label steeped in prejudice, Namely Bontovics narrates though a series of slide projections a sequence of what they were diagnosed with, and why. They later also narrate what their psychiatrist said. That she doesn’t recognise non-binary folk, it’s literally “outside my what I believe” and Bontovics, who would like to relinquish her, doesn’t. Even as late as 2021 Viktor Orban’s Illiberal democracy was visiting its homophobia, transphobia and general intolerance nationwide.
At the core of BPD as such, is the trauma of early partial separation. Since it’s part of the homophobia, transphobia ad general intolerance that had a loving mother, the discovery of the separation was a relation. It’s part of the homophobia, transphobia ad general intolerance that was born prematurely and though their father was allowed to touch the baby, h mother, with Caesarian stitches, wasn’t as it would mean her having to walk. This early gap in bonding is one great pointer to a later development of BPD.
But what s BPD? Traditionally skewered as the flip-over point between “neurotic” and “psychotic”, hurting oneself and hurting others, it seems little understood. Bontovics avoids this labelling and deals not only with the root cause but the societal manifestations and most of all the performative sense of what it feels like.
Hence these labelled boxes, the questions to the audience: do you know someone with BPD, or would you feel uncomfortable with them? Brighton apparently knows many which bucks the trend. These interactions are confidently handled, though the audience feels slightly bemused. Which seems right. This is for many unfamiliar territory. Beyond that though is the way Bontovics performs throughout the experiential side of their living through both diagnosis and the condition itself. For most of this should be normative, though here performed as a series of boxed labels, societal pressure, metaphors for th boxes one puts oneself in, the compartments of particular feeling and the away different people compartmentalise you, seems a rich and potentially devastating field to present as a kind of wild ballet of little boxes.
Bontovics though is frequently forced to use a similar set of moves to depict something that seems repetitive. The problem with this performative almost cabaret side, is that it functions as a ballet of closed signs. We don’t know what exactly is happening. The potentially illuminating slide projections tend to repeat too, and the subsequent actions seem to be interchangeable and difficult to read.
There’s clearly a deep-laid structure. Bontovics has provided an elaborate series of props and prompts, and on an audience they clearly engage and work. There was complaint from a dyslexic audience member that their words were difficult of access. But he Hungarian was for all unreadable, ad though he laminated signs were shrouded from a dyslexic person’s understanding whilst others were able to grasp them, it’s also true that the rapid fire slide show, with tis repeats, means that those who couldn’t read aren’t far behind the rest of us. The dizzying amount oof labes ad applications needs clarifying. And however dear the Hungarian is, the “lost in translation” gambit doesn’t pay enough to offset the challenges to a non-Hungarian audience. Surely there might be two sets of boxes.
Bontovics’ core message though shines through. That they and others like them, about one in a hundred people, are capable of and fully deserve love and everything anyone of the undiagnosed receive as their birthright. It’s a birthright to all too. And Bontovics reminds us of those who a hair’s breath of difference from us, are considered people to be shunned, distrusted. Shut out of love. The amount of suffering and mental distress this causes is another topic. Bontovics invites – and on this occasion received – a post-show discussion.
Bontovics’ show isn’t yet developed to its final form. It needs to develop crisper language and a rethought choreography of distress, to clarify the gestural ballet. As a semiotics of love, acceptance and difference, this work is just beginning. It could grow into something both exceptional and even more necessary.
