Lambeth Fringe Interview: Sining Gui on 10 loves

10 Loves imagines a world where married couples are legally required to say “I love you” ten times a day, a strange and pointed premise for a play about love, class and labour. Ahead of its two performances at Lambeth Fringe, writer-director Sining Gui talked to Red Bus Londinium about drawing the idea from her own experience of retail work, and what happens when the same three words have to carry a relationship through six very different scenes.

Red Bus: The idea of couples being legally required to prove their love through ten acts of “sweetness” is a brilliant, strange starting point. Where did that conceit come from, and how literally does the play follow the ten acts as a structure?

Sining Gui: For me, the law is really an externalisation of something many of us already ask of ourselves: to hold on to the things that make us feel human, rather than becoming nothing more than a functioning part of the social machine. We want to keep caring, loving, creating and maintaining relationships, even when the conditions of our lives make those things difficult.

That idea came very directly from my own experience of working-class life. I currently support myself through retail work, and I’ve become increasingly aware of how much time, energy and emotional capacity work can consume. Sometimes, after work, I struggle not only to make theatre, but even to talk to friends and family. The things I work to sustain are also the things that work can leave me with the least capacity to sustain. I found similar tensions when talking to other theatre-makers, including the actors in 10 Loves. The law simply takes that pressure to keep caring and makes it external and literal.

The “ten” is literal within the world of the play: each married person has to say “I love you” directly to their partner ten times a day. But I didn’t want those ten expressions to become ten separate sections or stages of the relationship. I was much more interested in repeating exactly the same expression and watching it gradually have to carry different meanings.

So the play moves through six scenes at different points in the relationship. The timer and counters remain, the words remain, and the rules remain, but the circumstances around them don’t. An “I love you” in one scene doesn’t necessarily do the same thing as an “I love you” in another. The repetition itself became part of the structure for me: something stays fixed, while what is happening around and through it keeps changing. And what causes those changes is, for me, one of the most interesting questions in the play.

Red Bus: Love, class and labour are an unusual trio to put together. Which of the three came first for you, and how did the others grow up around it?

Sining Gui: Labour came first, simply because it grew directly out of my own work experience. But class followed very quickly. I began to realise that labour occupies very different places in people’s lives depending on their material circumstances, and that different kinds of work give people very different amounts of autonomy and protection from being depleted by it.

In the kind of low-paid, entry-level retail work I’ve experienced, physical exhaustion is the most immediate effect. But it goes beyond being tired. Much of the work is repetitive and standardised. There can be very little space for autonomy, individuality or creativity, while at the same time you’re constantly giving emotional energy to other people. The job doesn’t have to follow you home for the effects of the labour to do so. You can finish your shift and leave the work itself behind, but still come home with less capacity to think, create, feel or respond. In that sense, the job can start to feel as though it has taken more than the hours you were paid for.

That’s where love enters for me, and I mean love quite broadly here. It can be love for another person, for what you want to create, for your own life, even for yourself. When so much of your physical and emotional capacity has already been consumed, love starts to become a kind of luxury, because loving anything requires you to still have the capacity to feel and respond to it.

Red Bus: As both writer and director, do you find it easier or harder to let go of the script once you’re staging it, or does one role keep feeding the other right up to opening?

Sining Gui: For me, the two roles have been feeding each other from the beginning. I think there was already a director’s way of thinking in how I wrote 10 Loves. I tend to think through what an idea can become on stage, how a theatrical device might work, and what possibilities a particular structure or setting can create. The concept and the theatrical setup of 10 Loves came very early in the process. Then, as a writer, I had to turn that concept into a world that two people could actually live in. For me, a lot of the process has been about finding a balance between those two ways of thinking: allowing the theatrical concept to remain very visible, while giving the relationship enough space to develop its own life.

Then, when I come back to the script as a director, the relationship almost reverses. My directing process is very grounded in close text analysis, and I’ve found moments where something I wrote instinctively suddenly connects with another detail elsewhere in the play, even though I didn’t consciously construct that connection at the time. There is something incredibly satisfying about feeling that the characters have begun to prove themselves to you, as if they’ve developed a life and logic of their own, and the world of the play has started to come alive with them.

Rehearsal takes that one step further. Working with the actors lets us test those discoveries, but also develop them and find possibilities I hadn’t seen on the page. The relationship between writing and directing continues all the way through rehearsal: each time I return to the work from a different position, I discover something new in it.

Red Bus: With just two performers carrying the whole hour, how did you and the cast approach building trust between Moana and Daniel’s characters when the play is asking them to perform intimacy almost as a legal obligation?

Sining Gui: Rather than treating the relationship as a simple movement from sincere love to performed intimacy, we’ve been interested in how the same “I love you” becomes increasingly complicated by everything it has to carry. It can hold affection alongside reassurance, apology, obligation, frustration or conflict, and sometimes become harder to say or heavier in its effect.

Trust starts with the rehearsal room itself. Creating a space where actors feel safe and free to explore is a basic principle in all my work. Before our first rehearsal, for example, I gave both actors a body-boundary chart so that physical boundaries were clear from the beginning.

From there, the detailed text analysis I learnt through Katie Mitchell’s methodology gives us a very solid shared understanding of the characters, their circumstances and the world they inhabit. That shared belief gives the actors something concrete to enter and trust. I then adapt Meisner exercises for each scene, changing the rules and variables to alter how the actors attend to, avoid or communicate with each other. As “I love you” is gradually introduced into those exercises, they can experience what happens when the same words carry different intentions, and how it feels to inhabit the changing states of the relationship.

The analysis gives us precision, while the exercises allow the actors to experience it. I’m also very fortunate to be working with two excellent and highly professional actors, who are able to take that structure and remain incredibly responsive to each other within it.

Red Bus: Bread & Roses is quite a specific room to stage something about class and labour in. Did the venue shape any choices in the writing or staging?

Sining Gui: Not really in the writing or staging itself. The minimal set and the basic spatial relationship were already quite clearly defined in the script. It was almost the other way around: the play shaped my choice of venue.

10 Loves is a very intimate and quiet piece. Its emotional life comes largely through small, naturalistic interactions rather than highly theatrical or explosive conflict, so I wanted a small indoor black-box space where the audience could be physically close to the actors without surrounding them. Among the festival venues available, Bread & Roses felt particularly suited to that kind of relationship between the performers and the audience. It has also been a very supportive place to bring the production, and we’re really grateful for that.

BOOKING DETAILS:

Monday 5 & Tuesday 6 October 2026, 6.00pm, Bread & Roses Theatre, presented as part of Lambeth Fringe 2026. Running time approximately 60 minutes. Booking: https://lambethfringe.com/events/10-loves

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