Writer: Ken Ludwig
Director: Simon Reade
Playwright Ken Ludwig is more commonly known for comedy, from the 1980s farce Lend Me a Tenor to the book for the Gershwin musical Crazy For You. With Dear Jack, Dear Louise, he ventures into more overtly romantic territory, but retains the light touch for which he is known.
In this tale of an epistolary romance, Preston Nyman plays Jacob ‘Jack’ Ludwig, an army doctor from Pennsylvania, who, at the play’s start, is stationed in Oregon, caring for soldiers injured during America’s WWII Pacific campaigns. At the suggestion of a family friend, he begins a pen-pal relationship with Eva Feiler’s Louise, a Brooklyn-based actress and dancer. Their missives start off polite and exploratory, but quickly deepen into an emotional attachment despite never meeting.
Two individuals reading out letters would not make for great theatre, no matter how great their content – and Ludwig, basing his play on his parents’ own correspondence, has some brilliant content with which to work. The script neatly fillets their exchanges into something more conversational. While Nyman and Feiler are careful never to look one another in the eye, it is sometimes easy to forget that their characters are on opposite sides of the US and that their conversations may span days.
What brings this home are the occasional moments when one or the other correspondent is unable to write, leaving the other to shout into the wind on stage as they wait for a reply. Mainly, though, we have a sweetly comic romance between the reserved Jack and Louise’s effervescence. Act I is generally tension-free, even when Louise meets Jack’s family, including his formidable 11 aunts and a sister who may offer a murderous slant on sibling jealousy. For the most part, the war effort is more of a romantic obstacle, denying Jack enough leave to visit Louise.
Tensions increase in the second act, both as Jack is moved closer to the front and as Louise gets a coveted job on a touring production. Despite their never having met, Nyman and Feiler utterly sell the romantic devotion they have constructed, such that any jealousy they feel – Jack towards the men he believes will swarm around Louise now she is a popular actress, Louise to the nurse with whom Jack has an ill-advised and heartbreaking dalliance – feels genuine and earned.
The romance stays in place, joined by more desperate pleas wishing the war would end. Again, it often feels as if the war’s biggest impact is on the inconvenience it offers – until, post D-Day, Jack joins troops moving into formerly occupied French villages, and recounts some of the atrocities inflicted upon the communities, particularly the Jewish people who were rounded up.
Despite such moments, though, this remains a profoundly romantic story of two people who found each other through letter writing, now brought to life once again on stage. What could be a simple verbal exercise is rendered beautifully by Robert Innes Hopkins’s simple set dressings, working in conjunction with Richard Williamson’s subtly effective lighting choices. At every stage, the emphasis is on the correspondence and the genuine heart of the people writing it – a love letter to Ludwig’s parents and how they met.
Runs until 2 May 2026
