Review: LETTERS by Kashyap Raja at Jack Studio Theatre 26-29 July 2022

‘A great conceit, but it doesn’t fully deliver its promise’ ★★★

This play is structured around a brilliant idea. Two friends, Josh and Mary, communicate only by letter, never phone calls, emails, or social media, as move to different parts of the world after knowing each other for a short time in London. Mary moves back to her family in Argentina, and Josh goes to ‘find himself’ in India. After months, years, of letter writing, they are drawn back to together, pouring their hearts into their letters, even though they never see each other.

We are told that Kashyap Raja, the writer of this play, ‘creates a world that is devoid of the transitory nature of instant messaging and brings back the nostalgic era of writing letters.’ This sounded, to me, like a fascinating subject to explore. During the 2020 lockdown, a close friend and I handwrote letters to each other for a period of a few months. In a time when the whole world seemed to have slowed down, our communication slowed down too. This will sound naïve, but you have to really think about what you put into a letter. They took me over an hour to write. You construct them. You find yourself revealing things you would never do via text or social media post, even though social media is supposed to reveal everything about you. A letter is also, usually, directed at one person: it is a highly personal gift of a thing which connects you to the sender not just from what they tell you, but through the knowledge of the time they’ve spent writing it. This is certainly worlds away from our various forms of instant messaging. 

Only some of these ideas came through in the play. It’s a great conceit for the only speech to be the letters Josh and Mary have composed. Paper, the letters they’ve sent, hang from the ceiling like bunting, and the two actors remove them to read, then clip them back up afterwards. We see how the receiver/listener responds as the sender/speaker reads or performs the letter aloud. It’s something which could potentially feel flat and repetitive but managed never to feel so: it’s clever to show the twists and turns of a relationship when only one person can speak at a time. Alina Illin as Mary is particularly convincing and emotionally engaging.

More broadly, however, the play becomes more about their inevitable blossoming romance than the act of letter writing itself. With only a brief introduction to their decision to reject modern means of communication, we launch into Josh’s time in India, how it changes him to care for people less privileged than himself, to live more ethically. He is jealous of Mary’s romantic endeavours, especially when she begins a new relationship with someone with whom she is infatuated. And then comes another inevitable plot point: Mary gets pregnant, by a partner who now wants nothing to do with her. Personally, I do find it frustrating when the go-to complication for a female character is that they suddenly find themselves expecting a baby. Josh’s story involves his growth and development, whereas Mary’s was one of mistakes and her decline: she is ‘saved’ by Josh, someone who tells her in a letter that ‘you always loved me’, meant she seemed to lack agency, despite otherwise being a candid and straight-talking character.

The character’s individual stories touched on wider themes, such as Josh’s feeling of white guilt as he aligned his altruism with colonialism, or the fact that abortion is illegal in Argentina. But these, along with what it actually means to communicate by letter, felt like they weren’t explored in the detail they deserved. It felt like the play was more about their relationship than an exploration of how to buck current trends, the appeal of a lost art, or trying for a different way of life. Some of the letters sounded more like monologues than actual letters, with the characters’ inner thoughts, false starts, and indecisions spilling into their speech in a way that just does not happen with the written word. If it was to make us reconsider how we communicate and the time we take to do so, this point could have been punchier.

What was interesting to reflect on was two people living almost completely separate lives, with only infrequent crossovers through their written correspondence: they both reveal truths to each other that they cannot to other people, even their closest family, and this is what is supposed to draw them together. This, to me, is the potential power of letter writing.

Letters
Written and produced by Kashyap Raja 
Jack Studio Theatre
26-29^th July

https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/letters/

Reviewer bio:

Jonny Kemp just about finds time to write and paint when he's not being an English teacher at a central London 6th form. He completed a module in playwriting as part of his MA Modern and Contemporary Fiction at the University of Westminster and was shortlisted for the WRaP 2020 playwriting competition from the London Playwrights Blog. He had a script in hand performance of a short play at The Hope Mill in Manchester in 2021. He loves pubs and theatres, so pub theatres are a dream come true.