Written for Culture Wars
Perhaps someone at the Southbank Centre was cracking a joke by placing Love Letters Straight From Your Heart into the Blue Room. There may be no A-List nudity, but Uninvited Guests’ mutual love-in shares its ambition with David Hare’s play of the same name and La Ronde, on which it is based; namely, to celebrate love in all its permutations, smooth-running or otherwise.
“In this room”, says a suited Richard Dufty, “it is always Valentine’s Day. Everywhere.” Sat around a rose-specked, red-clothed banquet table, as if guests at a wedding, we listen to tales of romance and unrequited love, of broken hearts and bezzie mates.
At either end, behind laptops and sound desks, gazing into each others’ eyes, sit Dufty and his performing partner Jessica Hoffmann. Armed with well-stocked iTunes libraries, they start to duel with love songs, cycling through the anonymous song dedications and love stories donated by its audience. There’s Elvis and George Benson, Burt Bacharach and Beyonce. Some are gushingly overblown. Some are scorched with regret. Others, a tad inappropriate. All are elegantly, glowingly sincere.
Besides the fun of spotting the loved-up culprit (usually either teary or shame-faced), there’s a gentle, but unabashed, sentimentality in all this. Certain songs take a tuning fork to your spine (Fools Rush In gets me every time). Others tickle your tear ducts into life or tease your lips into a light smile. It can be pinpointedly affecting.
Yet, there’s a more cynical side to Love Letters..., which (knowingly) manufactures the seemingly personal as much as any inscription on a love heart. “This was our song and it will remain that way forever,” runs one dedication. “Hang about,” you think, “it’s my song too.” They are all out songs. Smartly, even as it uses such cultural triggers, it consciously undermines them.
Lit by the lonely glow of their computer screens, Dufty and Hoffman seem like two late-night DJs forever churning out dedications; a purgatory of other people’s romantic gestures. They grow increasing dishevelled and start to compete. Loving stares tense into sharpened glares. Love songs seem to slip out of tune like milk turning sour.
Love is…a lived experience. Not a greetings card slogan. It runs in the blood, not bloodless prose. And it can hurt like hell.
This is all part of the endless chase – itself a central (and beautifully constructed) image of Love Letters..., which manages to suggest that perhaps we are all placed on earth to scour its face for a mate.
At the same time, the piece rattles off a number of ideas, without really nailing its colours to the mast. Uninvited Guests open up an hour for the consideration of love, but, for all the delicacy of their offering, don’t really say that much. As a show reliant on lists, a post-dramatic trope that almost guarantees gratification, it is inevitably flattish and, I daresay, a little easy.
Photograph: Uninvited Guests/FUEL
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