A R Gurney's account of a 50-year love affair, conducted almost entirely by letter, between two excruciatingly dull Wasp types, was written as an exercise to help the author familiarise himself with his new word processor. It may have a place in a keyboard manual, but it has no more place in the theatre than my daily one pint or two correspondence with my milkman.
Regrettably, Love Letters has become a bit of a party piece for celebrity couples who have reached that stage in their careers where the gaps in the diary begin to match the gaps in their memories. Nothing to learn here, because you just read it off a lectern. And hey! you can do the whole thing sitting down, so it's easy on those troublesome varicose veins.
The plot is this: Andrew Makepiece Ladd III and Melissa Gardner, two rich kids from old American families, meet in kindergarten and continue to write to each other through prep school, college and lives that take him into the Senate and her on a descent into drunkenness. Too late they realise that they really love each other.
You might possibly, just very, very possibly, be made to care if either the writing or the characterisation had any depth. But stuffed shirt Andy is merely overbearing, poor little rich girl Melissa is over-privileged, and unfortunately for us, over here the dire duo are being played by real life couple Charlton Heston and his wife Lydia Clarke Heston.
I heard Mr Heston remark the other day on the radio what a pleasure it was to be able to combine a British vacation with work. But the holiday is all taking place on stage. These are either disgracefully incompetent or disgracefully lazy performances. It is perhaps telling that no director is credited. The delivery is monotonous, Heston is sometimes inaudible and both spend the evening with their heads buried in their lecterns making minimal contact with each other and even less with the audience. When I say that I wonder furiously if they had ever seen the script before, that is not to suggest for one minute that they make it seem new minted. They make it sound like a laundry list.
The evening so lacks animation that I had to suppress an overwhelming desire to rush up on stage and pinch them to check they were still alive.
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