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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

GUNTER

★★★★

Royal Court

GUNTER at the Royal Court

★★★★

“With absolute trust between the performers, this is a tight and brilliant ensemble performance”

Gunter, is a well-deserved transfer for Dirty Hare’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2023 production to the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

It is exciting and innovative theatre, wonderfully performed by three actors, and one historian who also plays the modern sound track live on stage.

As the audience arrive, the horrifying news film footage of the traditional modern-day, all-male Shrovetide Football match plays out on a screen – the brutal medieval ball game still played today.

The show is set in 1604 and is based on the true story of a Berkshire parish. Brian Gunter (Hannah Jarrett-Scott), the richest man in the village, kills the two young Gregory boys during the traditional and violent Shrovetide Football match. Because of Gunter’s power he gets away with murder. But when Elizabeth Gregory (Julia Grogan), the strong grieving mother, questions both Gunter and the law, the bad man shows his manipulative strength.

Gunter’s innocent daughter, Anne (Norah Lopez Holden), is suddenly bewitched, and of course, the witch hunt immediately points to Elizabeth and her female friends. So ensues the many trials of both Elizabeth – and indeed Anne.

As the story unfolds through song and physical theatre, the three actors each play multiple roles telling the tale of poor Anne Gunter. With absolute trust between the performers, this is a tight and brilliant ensemble performance – as the actors, wearing pristine white modern day football kits and the white stage set, gradually become covered in blood, mud, honey and gore.

Gunter has its quirk, as the historian Lydia Higman narrates the more historical facts – facts that are also typed in bold and lit up on the back projector. Sadly, Higman is unable to fill in the missing gaps – crucially that history does not know what became of Anne Gunter after the trials. There are no historical facts. Higman, even with her light touch, doesn’t add any value to the play by being on stage – apart from her rather fine musicality.

The piece is directed with beautiful minutiae by Rachel Lemon, who co-created the piece alongside Lydia Higman and Julia Grogan. There is slight overkill with the opening song’s repetition of the words “the bad man”, which is repeated throughout the show. We get it.

Gunter pertains to be feminist theatre, giving a voice to the unheard women in history whose stories were never told. And it is depressing that this is the same sorry story today, about every woman who has a bad man in her life and her voice is still not heard…. Not a lot has changed – and that is Gunter’s point.


GUNTER at the Royal Court

Reviewed on 6th April 2024

by Debbie Rich

Photography by Alex Brenner

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

COWBOIS | ★★★★★ | January 2024
MATES IN CHELSEA | ★★★ | November 2023
CUCKOO | ★★½ | July 2023
BLACK SUPERHERO | ★★★★ | March 2023
FOR BLACK BOYS … | ★★★★★ | April 2022

GUNTER

GUNTER

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