Love Letters Tickets

Love Letters – A worldwide smash hit of a romance.

Your venue? It's the beautiful Theatre Royal Haymarket. The play? It's Love Letters, and it's stirring stuff. This wonderful play first opened in New York City during 1989. It's well known for its success as a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It fast became a huge hit and has been on stage more or less non-stop since then, somewhere in the world. It's a classic that keeps on giving - don't miss the romance!

Back in 1989, in New York city, a new play made history. It was called Love Letters, and it was a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Since then it has cropped up hundreds of times across the world, crossing cultural boundaries with ease. Wherever you're from, whatever you do or think or believe, we all love a good romance. A play with a long tradition of casting real life and on-screen couples as the protagonists, this time around it stars Martin Shaw and Jenny Seagrove.

This imaginative piece of theatre, as its author says, “needs no theatre, no lengthy rehearsal, no special set, no memorization of lines, and no commitment from its two actors beyond the night of performance.” Made up of the letters the pair exchanged over a lifetime, read out loud, it's an unusually evocative, touching, funny and revealing character study. In this play, like no other, the things that are implied are just as eye-opening as the things that are written down in the actual letters. Clever stuff!

What's the plot?

Love letters is both tragic and comic, a tender imagining of the shared nostalgia, missed opportunities, and deep friendship that develops between two lifelong friends who have complex pasts. Interestingly it's the perfect play for our times, with the theme of a physical separation between two people people who are actually brought closer together over the years thanks to honest communications, shared confessions and brave confidences in the letters they exchange.

When young Andrew Makepeace Ladd III accepts an invitation to Melissa Gardner’s birthday party, she sends him a note to say thanks. And that one small, simple act opens up a friendship that develops into a lovely, warm romance nurtured by mail for almost five decades. A.R. Gurney's Love Letters explores their shared nostalgia, staged simply, with two actors behind desks or sitting in comfy chairs, letting their words describe an entire universe of emotion.

Who's on the creative team?

Just as clever as it is gorgeous, this fine piece of classic theatre is directed by the wonderful Roy Marsden. Martin Shaw has recently starred in TV's Judge John Deed, plus A Man For All Seasons and An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket. Jenny Seagrove last performed at the Haymarket in How The Other Half Loves. Welcome back!

Who is this show for?

This is a subtle play about romance between two adults, so probably isn't suitable for children. There isn't an age restriction yet, but we'll let you know if one is imposed.