Writer: Samantha Streit
Director: Jessica Whiley
As the audience enter Pleasance Bunker 3 they are transported into a forgotten world as photographs and letters hanging from the ceiling serve as a reminder of when communication consisted of more than just a few short sentences and photos weren’t stored on laptops. Writer and actor Samantha Streit sits underneath them surrounded by pages of script and cue cards while dreamy 1950s music plays quietly in the background.
It is a perfect opening to a reflective piece honouring the memory of her grandparents on her mother’s side and also making the case for a revival of the lost art of letter writing. Framed around letters the two of them wrote to each other in the early days of their relationship, it shows their strong desire to be together but also hints at versions of themselves that never came to pass. Streit is joined by her Granddad, played by Kevin Cahill, and their conversation is punctuated by the letters she takes from a box while asking him questions about their later lives.
While it’s clear that the play is a loving tribute to her grandparents and an attempt to get to know more about their lives, the conversational style of the piece means that it suffers from excessive levels of exposition as she provides prompts for the letters that are responded to with large amounts of backstory. Streit’s attempts to find the connections between the people who wrote the letters and the people she knew as a child leads to a level of speculation that cuts into and disrupts the story told in the letters. It becomes more of an attempt to understand what happened after the letters than it does to imagine who they were at the time they wrote them.
The strength of Streit’s writing only really emerges in the closing moments as she reads a last letter from Joan that is written to her children. It’s achingly beautiful with poignant observations about the different points in their Life. The closing moments as she reads a last letter from Joan that is written to her children. It’s achingly beautiful with poignant observations about the different points in their lives that the writer and recipient have reached. It also hints at what the play and concept could be if it let the letters speak for themselves and provide their own commentary.
Runs until 31 August 2026 (not 19th) | Image: Contributed
