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

★★

“Occasionally it feels as though the actors, lost in their own underworld, are making it up as they go along”

“Orpheus was beginning to get very tired of sitting by his girlfriend on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice he had peeped into the book she was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Orpheus, ‘without pictures or conversation?’

Apart from the name changes, the opening line of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ would slot neatly into the stage directions of Sarah Ruhl’s reimagining of “Eurydice”. There is an almost childlike absurdism to the language. A kind of existential nonsense.

Eurydice and Orpheus are at the seaside: a couple of awkward teenagers, looking at life in different ways, but not really looking at each other. She is into her books; he just cares for his music. A bit of an odd couple. They don’t come across as being madly in love with each other at all, so when Orpheus pops the question, it feels like another game.

Meanwhile, Eurydice’s dead father is preparing his wedding speech. He obviously can’t attend the wedding, so he drops the letter down to earth, only for it to be picked up by the bowler-hatted, interesting yet sinister Lord of the Underworld. He picks up the letter, then promptly picks up Eurydice as she escapes her wedding party for a breath of fresh air. Eurydice follows him to his high-rise apartment where things get a bit uncomfortable. Tragedy strikes, and while Eurydice trips on the stairs to her death, the show itself plunges further into a rabbit hole of surrealism.

Ruhl’s intention is to take the focus away from Orpheus and to tell the story through Eurydice’s perspective. She certainly gives her more stage time, but we remain somewhat confused as to whom we should be paying attention to. Eve Ponsonby reliably portrays Eurydice as a woman stuck between two different worlds, but the audience are lodged between differing viewpoints. She has crossed the River Lethe in the Underworld thereby forgetting her earthly existence, even her husband’s name. Her journey of love, loss and grief (although without the memory – what is there to grieve?) is one that she must take on her own, yet we cannot escape the prominence of the men. Especially her father, played with conviction by Dickon Tyrrell. Keaton Guimarães-Tolley’s Orpheus is less secure and lacking passion. Joe Wiltshire Smith, as the Lord of the Underworld, has the most fun. Described as a nasty, interesting man, he is by far the most interesting character onstage. Not so much nasty as sinisterly bonkers. A warped Jimmy Clitheroe through the looking glass.

The narrative is underscored with interjections from the ‘stones’, played with a Pythonesque inanity by Katy Brittain, Tom Morley and Leyon Stolz-Hunter. Bizarrely dressed like creepy nuns, they are not so much a chorus but an echoing backing vocal. The timing of their delivery is often out of kilter, lending further banality to their presence – which we had already begun to question.

Director Stella Powell-Jones bravely takes on all the idiosyncrasies of the script but, even at under an hour and a half, the story still drags – weighed down further by its inconsistencies. Occasionally it feels as though the actors, lost in their own underworld, are making it up as they go along. We do wonder what world Ruhl is creating, and while we admire the ideas that shape her interpretation of “Eurydice”, we are not truly inspired to dig deeper. Curiouser and curiouser we aren’t.

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”

LETTERS FROM MAX

Hampstead Theatre

Reviewed on 2nd June 2925

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Helen Murray

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

LETTERS FROM MAX

LETTERS FROM MAX

LETTERS FROM MAX

EURYDICE at Jermyn Street Theatre

★★

“Occasionally it feels as though the actors, lost in their own underworld, are making it up as they go along”

EURYDICE at Jermyn Street Theatre

Reviewed on 8th October 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Alex Brenner

Previously reviewed at this venue:

EURYDICE

EURYDICE

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