Tonight's performance of Letters Live hammered home my deficiencies as a writer.
This may sound negative, but it isn't. Watching the show was a beautifully enriching experience. It served to remind me how powerful, emotive and evocative a letter can be. It can act like a direct channel to the thoughts and feelings of people of the past; more than a list of dates or statistics in a history book will ever do.
It made me mourn the near loss of the medium as a form of communication. You could argue that the email has replaced it - but there's something sterile and emotionless about an existenceless collection of characters on a computer screen, when compared to sheet after sheet of hand-or-typewritten correspondence. It's less tangible, and somehow less valuable for it.
It helped that the letters were beautifully read. A whole of host of familiar faces stepped up to the lectern (their bodies were there too), including Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliet Stevenson, Toby Jones, Matt Berry and Kylie Minogue. Each person brought their letter to life. The show wasn't about celebrity, despite the present A-list. It was about what they read. We weren't interested in the famous person in the room, but the thoughts of the person that they were priveliged to subsume, absorb and relay.
Some of the letters were shockingly private and intimate. All were performed tactfully and with respect. The fact that they were mostly read by actors made me connect with the content quicker and easier than if I'd just been reading them to myself.
I was struck by how conversational they were. This could be to do with the method in which they were written; the restriction of writing longhand or with a typewriter made it more difficult to self-edit, resulting in a more honest, more stream-of-consciousness outcome, Not that there isn't such a thing as a second draft.
The show reminded me that we're essentially all the same. The human animal doesn't change. We all have similar worries and desires. We're all connected by the same emotions. I just wish I could convey mine as succinctly as the unwitting authors of Letters Live did.
I once received a letter from the actress who played Dorothy Burke in Neighbours. I was sad to see it didn't make the cut.