Theatre Royal Haymarket, London
The emotional and physical distance of this epistolary novel for the stage is ideal for Covid-era theatre, performed here with power and finesse
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.