Last evening I had the pleasure of watching “Love Letters” a play/reading by Evam at RangaShankara. The plot of the play is best explained by this short para taken from their official website:
The play traces the lifelong correspondence of the staid, dutiful lawyer Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and the lively, unstable artist Melissa Gardner; the story of their bittersweet relationship gradually unfolds from what is written — and what is left unsaid — in their letters. Love Letters is the story of these two people- and their relationship explored through their letters written to each other over 50 years
The play was written by A R Gurney and the letters were read by RJ Suchi and Karthik Kumar. Firstly I have to admit that the performance was absolutely top notch. I think that deep down I could relate a lot to the plot of the script and that influenced my opinion a lot. It is very hard to make a reading interesting but Evam seemed to have taken care of that without much problem.(I only yawned during the break :P )
Performance wise, for me the day was owned by Suchi. Her body language while she read the letters was mostly immaculate to the age of the author of the letters at that time. Interestingly her voice for the younger Melissa was coy and immature which came out so well and delivered the punch. The way she moved, her haste in sitting down and the way she turned from one letter to the next was very much like Melissa Towards the end the maturity came thru but only to a point, for instance I lost track of the age Melissa and all of a sudden I heard they were 50 odd, which confused me a bit. Karthik Kumar was perfect with punch lines but I felt the age factor lacked a bit in the voice. The younger Andrew seemed much more mature than his actions which he explained in his letters, something which again got my compass spinning in the play.
The pauses in the play were great but there were instances where I felt the pauses odd, like the time where Andrew stops writing in the middle of a letter to go learn a poem and comes back to write the rest of it based on what he just read. The odd factor here was that the 5 seconds of aimless walking in the pause destroyed the illusion of the performance, I was in that short time reminded that I was at RangaShankara watching a play! Something as small as that is really unsettling and sadly I will remember that over the other ingenious stuff in the play.
I am not certain if it would have been better if they could have tried to let their voices age along with the time line of the play… then again they could have tried it and realized that this version came out better.
All in all the play is definitely worth checking out, I have always felt Evam’s comedies are much better, will find that out for sure when I watch their next play in a couple of days time :)