Sarah Ruhl’s dramatisation of the letters exchanged between two great poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, was first seen at Yale Rep in 2012 and is not without precedent.
What is unusual about Ellen McDougall’s staging is that two different actors perform the show each night without rehearsal, in an attempt to depict “life as it is lived”. Even though I question the principle, Jade Anouka and Jonjo O’Neill did a fine job on press night, and the piece offers a rich testimony to the possibilities of romantic friendship – one that endured from 1947 to 1977.
Anouka and O’Neill sit at white desks at opposite ends of a traverse stage responding to the letters as they arrive. At times, they follow precise directions: it was amusing to see O’Neill, recapturing one of the couple’s rare meetings in Maine, coping with instructions as to where to place a picnic basket and bottle of wine.
Periodically the curtains behind the actors part to suggest changes of circumstance. Lowell’s marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick is evoked through a shower of white petals; Bishop’s move to Brazil and long-term relationship with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares is seen through a cascade of red leaves.
The heart of the piece, however, lies in the glowing intimacy of the letters themselves.
Lowell compares psychotherapy to stirring up the bottom of an aquarium (“chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles”) and dwells ruefully on “the might have been” had he proposed to Bishop. She, too, is a mix of wit, self-revelation and bruising honesty. She says that an illuminated swimming pool makes “one’s friends look like luminous frogs” and, for all her love of Lowell, criticises his use of Hardwick’s letters in his book of poems, The Dolphin. What moves one is the way they open their souls to each other with the candour of true friends.
Anouka, with her steadfast gaze, and O’Neill, with his air of capricious melancholy, are first-rate. My only query about an excellent evening concerns the need for the actors to approach the letters unrehearsed. Isn’t reproducing nightly the jagged rawness of real life precisely what actors are trained to do?
• At the Gate theatre, London, until 9 February.
