The Critics on 'Selected Plays':
The Randy Dandy
'Mr Stewart Love has come to be known as the 'Belfast John Osborne'. This is a description that is superficially apt, if applied to this play, but it is at once too high-pitched and inadequate.'
(Northern Whig)
'Love was concerned with the wider theme of one man's fight against the stranglehold of his humdrum life. Like all good Irishmen, Love is an exciting juggler with word pictures, recalling in some of his phrases the music of that earlier master J. M. Synge.'
(Daily Mail)
' … a play whose integrity and wit positively swallow-dived off the screen. In his Dandy Jordan, author Stewart Love has created an anti-hero – a sizzling dissenter from the scruffy world of acceptance. James Ellis was magnetic as this honest rebel'
(Daily Mirror)
'Mr James Ellis, a hero sometimes admirable but never sympathetic, played with harshness, vindicating a Puritan ethic in a loosely amoral world.'
(Times)
The Big Long Bender
'Stewart Love is a brilliant Ulster playwright. "The Big Long Bender", his best work to date, was an electrifying experience. '
(Belfast Telegraph)
'For here was a play that worked its characters and situations so deeply into the minds of the audience that they still mattered long after the final curtain.'
(Belfast Telegraph)
'The play remains very much one to be seen – and talked about.'
(Belfast Telegraph)
The Big Donkey
'Here was a moving, dramatic, intelligent play.'
(Belfast Newsletter)
' … a gripping study of soul erosion in a Belfast shipyard.'
(Daily Telegraph)
'Whatever he was trying to say about life today, Mr Love succeeded in making a hero out of Donkey Joe with the curtain line about responsibility'
(Daily Mirror)
'Mr Bell suggested too, the gropings of an averagely intelligent man among unfamiliar abstractions. Joe expects his foreman-father to sacrifice elementary justice to find him a job, rejects crime as the way to an easy life, but not only takes its proceeds from Eddie, his best friend, but steals the job that would both rehabilitate and rebuild his shattered family life. One senses that Mr Love forgives Joe more easily than Joe forgives himself.'
(Times)
Me Oul Segocia
'Until there arises an Ulster O'Casey, Stewart Love will serve quite nicely to point up the domestic angle within the great Ulster tragedy with his play "Me Oul Segocia" '
(Northern Whig)
'By the end of the play, when the statement is made that 'a neighbour's son has died in tragic circumstances; of course I'm going to the funeral', it sounds with such courage, becomes such an assertion of precious human values under direct and terrible siege, that there is not doubt at all that the play itself charts an historic degradation. '
(Irish News)
It is very funny, very sad, and totally riveting. Mr Love is a modest man who accepted with charm the compliments poured upon him by some of the opening night's audience. If his name was O'Casey he would have little trouble in attracting more attention for this play.
'It is not too often that a play can bring a tear to my eye, but Stewart Love's "Me Oul Segocia" did just that.'
(Belfast Telegraph)
'By the end of the first performance and world premiere of Stewart Love's latest play "Me Oul Segocia" last night it was already apparent that many of those present had discovered a new Irish classic.' (Coleraine Chronicle)
'How many of them will be revived in ten or 20 years' time? I would guess that one that will not be forgotten is Stewart Love's "Me Oul Segocia".'
(Belfast Telegraph)
