Pandemic theatre has maximised revivals of scripts – monologues, or contrapuntal soliloquies – befitting social distancing. Love Letters, a 1988 play in which an American man and woman correspond across six decades from infancy to theoretical maturity, places them side by side, writing from different states: geographical and, crucially, emotional.
Hence measuring two metres between the ornate bureaus at which Jenny Seagrove and Martin Shaw sit is the only tweak required by director Roy Marsden to make this piece ideal for producer Bill Kenwright’s Covid-safe reopening of the Theatre Royal Haymarket.
The writer, AR Gurney, was the Broadway branch of the high-born US literary sub-group (including Henry James, Edith Wharton and Louis Auchincloss) who chronicled the lives of the monied Wasp mock-aristocracy: all balls, country weekends, and treacherous codes of behaviour. Love Letters, in effect an epistolatory novel for the stage, extends that largely prose tradition.
While Andrew Makepeace Ladd III sounds grander than Melissa Gardner, she is far wealthier, to the extent that, from their first meeting in kindergarten, the Gardners worry she is socialising down.
“Andy” and “Me” pile up letters, notes and postcards, through boarding school, college, the navy (for him) and art school (for her) into an adulthood in which both seek public recognition. We guess early on that Me will not become mother to Andrew Makepeace Ladd IV, but multiple complications take the play to dark places belying the conservatism of its surface.
Love Letters has a slightly hokey reputation as something two actors with a free week can read out with minimal preparation. Seagrove and Shaw, though, show what actors of serious heft can find through learning and rehearsing. Locating every note of wit and wounding, reacting with silent eloquence when “receiving” a letter, they beautifully suggest the growth of his pomposity and her yearnings from childhood sandpit to the pits of middle age.
The staging of any play in current circumstances is a love letter to theatre. Wasp etiquette dictates a punctual thank you note, which the audience sends with an ovation.
Love Letters is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 7 February.
