A romantic endeavour in more ways than one
Theatre Royal, Windsor ★★★★ ★
It’s remarkable how turrettouchingly close planes come to Windsor Castle on their groaning descent to nearby Heathrow. But perhaps the resulting noise blight is oddly reassuring at the moment for Her Majesty and family – a sign that life is returning to normal.
And the same, I think, applies to Love Letters, the reopening flourish for the (very nearby) Theatre Royal, Windsor, which is among the first regional venues to get actors trundling back across the boards again (with socially distanced but not temperature-checked audience watching).
There are moments during this protracted two-hander (which includes an interval) entailing a sedentary male/female epistolary exchange when you get the wearying sensation of people droning on. But it’s a big comfort, all the same, to see two actors of note (in this case Martin Shaw and Jenny Seagrove) gainfully employed for a few days amid the kind of scattered gathering that would have been barely unusual at a pre-pandemic matinee.
When the piece had its UK premiere in 1990, the late American playwright A R Gurney’s divertissement attracted cutting remarks galore from London’s critics. “It’s official,” sniped one, “Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers can actually read.” The Hart to Hart co-stars were conforming to a swiftly established casting modus operandi that trades on the fact that no one has to learn a script.
Obviously, in terms of actorly challenge, we’re miles from (say) Hamlet. Yet it takes some skill all the same to engage us in the fictional life stories of two friends, who, across 50 years, share childhood confidences, grow close, lose and then re-find their amorous point of connection mid-life.
Although it’s a mustily oldfashioned affair, the height of restraint, it can’t but help have a Covid-age flavour now: the sight of Shaw and Seagrove marooned behind wooden desks, black scenic void behind them, is quite 2020. There’s a new piquancy to the pangs of almost-requited love described – lockdown has had its costs.
Shaw plays the over-named Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, bespectacled and stiff but relaying winning youthful enthusiasm and adolescent awkwardness before school swottishness and legal career-bound stuffed-shirtism takes hold. Some may object to the narrative arc – he forward-marches to become Republican senator, she’s left by the wayside, along with her artistic aspirations, to seek the self-destructive consolation of booze. But if the sting in the tale is writ too large, the letters contain a strong grain of truth about the way life courses diverge. There’s a romance to setting down confidential thoughts and conflicted feelings on paper. A romance, too, in flinging open a theatre mid-pandemic to give those words an airing.