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LETTERS FROM MAX

★★★★

Hampstead Theatre

LETTERS FROM MAX

Hampstead Theatre

★★★★

“The pair occupy the stage for two hours but there is rarely a moment that does not busy the mind or heart”

The friendship of Sarah Ruhl and her student Max Ritvo was lyrical, beautiful and tragically – horrendously – short.

Ruhl’s epistolary play, based on letters they shared during his studies at Yale and his final illness, is a labour of love, filled with scintillating disquisitions on ideas, poetry, the meaning of life, and soup.

On the return of his cancer at the age of 20, Max wrote to Sarah, “Maybe we’ll squeeze a great play out of what comes out of this.”

And so it has come to pass.

Playwright Sarah and poet Max also agreed to make a book out of their prolific, often witty, correspondence, a collection on which the play is based. She wanted it organised chronologically, he wanted the material sorted by theme, chronology doing him no favours. Chronology, in fact, being the enemy.

But Max rarely concedes to despair. He is presented as garrulous, enthusiastic, voracious, confident and prone to wild, unembarrassed antics.

As his illness takes more of a grip, he states, “I love the world but it won’t love me back.”

In director Blanche McIntyre’s production, we have two performances that are delicate and calibrated. Sirine Saba, as Sarah, has the more subtle terrain to negotiate. Burdened with melancholy and worry, she is required to mark the slow death of Max’s brilliant mind but all the time rallying him to hope.

Eric Sirakian as Max swoops and hollers, he bounces and shouts his poetry, he racks, tortures and examines every facet of his existence … until he does not and cannot any more. (Max was 25 when he died in 2016.)

The pair occupy the stage for two hours but there is rarely a moment that does not busy the mind or heart. They are hypnotic performances of peculiar intimacy and warmth.

The third presence on the stage is Laura Moody, playing the cello. Such a brilliantly simple but evocative dramatic device with such a versatile instrument – rain, seagull screeches, plinky-plonk call-backs and swooping melodic snippets bring a third voice.

But what about the transparent screen that bisects the traverse stage, hanging like a curtain, insistent and intrusive? Sometimes the pair are one side of it, sometimes they are separated. It is initially awkward and needlessly annoying, but later thematically necessary.

It indicates that dialogue, arising from letters, is not the organic to and fro as presented but chunked and illusory, separated by time and considered thought. It offers the necessary signal of separation, both momentary and, alas, permanently.

When the lighting (Guy Hoare) changes, so does the nature of the screen. It can become a mirror, a barrier, no longer transparent, the reflections adding a mirage-like shimmer to flesh and blood. At one point, Max on one side, Sarah on the other, move their arms. On the screen, their reflections are holding hands.

The play is plainly an act of obligation by the author, a promise delivered. The poem selections sometimes verge on abstraction, risking detachment. And the audience requires a certain fortitude as Max’s decline plays out with tortuous precision.

However, this is as much a play about life and living as it is death and grief. You cannot help but leave the theatre with a renewed obligation to feast on the fleeting opportunities of existence. Starting with a course of cello lessons, perhaps.

 



LETTERS FROM MAX

Hampstead Theatre

Reviewed on 2nd June 2925

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Helen Murray

 


 

 

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

HOUSE OF GAMES | ★★★ | May 2025
PERSONAL VALUES | ★★★ | April 2025
APEX PREDATOR | ★★ | March 2025
THE HABITS | ★★★★★ | March 2025
EAST IS SOUTH | ★★★ | February 2025
AN INTERROGATION | ★★★★ | January 2025
KING JAMES | ★★★★ | November 2024
VISIT FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN | ★★ | July 2024
THE DIVINE MRS S | ★★★★ | March 2024
DOUBLE FEATURE | ★★★★ | February 2024

 

LETTERS FROM MAX

LETTERS FROM MAX

LETTERS FROM MAX

OVERFLOW

Overflow

★★★★★

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

OVERFLOW

Overflow

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Reviewed – 21st May 2021

★★★★★

 

“Overflow has seized the moment, in an abstract, but none the less compelling way, to confront us with some of the most pressing consequences of 2020”

 

The much delayed London premiere of Overflow has now arrived at Sadlers Wells, and judging by the enthusiastic reaction of the audience, the long wait has been worth it. Billed as a response to “digital technology” and “a growing awareness of the impacts…on our thoughts, behaviour and actions in the world”, Overflow is another striking work by cutting edge choreographer, Alexander Whitley. The production is a contemplation of a world that threatens dystopia. Whitley’s signature choreography appears again as a stark, complicated dance of intersecting bodies and technology divided and united, in light and in darkness. Throughout Overflow, Whitley challenges our senses to distinguish between the two. He and the company—dancers, light and sound artists— all play with optical and auditory illusions that leave our perceptions overstimulated and fragile. And that is the point.

As you might expect, there is nothing restful or soothing in Overflow. The dance is beauty born out of dissonance, and the audience has to deal with all the unsettled and confusing feelings prompted by that. It begins with smoky darkness and a pounding beat. There is something apocalyptic about the music (Rival Consoles, courtesy of Erased Tapes) that will please fans of Ben Frost, best known for his work in the TV series Dark —another work that references dystopia. The dancers (Joshua Attwood, Hannah Ekholm, Tia Hockey, David Ledger, Jack Thomson, and Yu-Hsien Wu) are continually emerging from the gloom and melting into it, accompanied by a confusing mix of otherworldly sounds and distorted conversations. The work of lighting designer Guy Hoare, and the talents of the light installation company Children of the Light, are the energies that illuminate even as they confine. The rest of the team, Luca Biada (creative technology), Ana Rajcevic (biometric face masks and costumes) and dramaturgy by Sasha Milavic Davies, provide the finishing touches that make Overflow a satisfying, if discordant, production.

Don’t miss your chance to see the work of the Alexander Whitley Dance Company. It’s seventy minutes that will, at times, be uncomfortable to engage with—and you might want to think twice if you have problems with flashing lights. Otherwise, hurry on down to Sadler’s Wells and get a head start on the zeitgeist as we emerge from the pandemic. Overflow has seized the moment, in an abstract, but none the less compelling way, to confront us with some of the most pressing consequences of 2020. It is worth the unsettling journey.

 

 

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Johan Persson

 


Overflow

Sadler’s Wells Theatre until 22nd May

 

Reviewed this year by Dominica:
Public Domain | ★★★★ | Online | January 2021
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice | ★★★ | Online | February 2021
Adventurous | ★★½ | Online | March 2021
Tarantula | ★★★★ | Online | April 2021
Stags | ★★★★ | Network Theatre | May 2021

 

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