The Gate’s production of ‘Dear Elizabeth’ will be restaged in 2021 at the slightly larger Theatro Technis, to allow for social distancing.
American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell wrote letters to each other for three decades between 1947 and 1977. And they’re entirely fascinating, taking in everything from intense admissions of their co-dependency to literary criticism to notes marking the triumphant acquisition of a pet toucan. Playwright Sarah Ruhl’s ‘Dear Elizabeth’ – which had its New York premiere in 2012 – dramatises their waxing and waning romantic friendship. Gate artistic director Ellen McDougall’s abbreviated, reworked staging of Ruhl’s play goes one step further, leading two different, unprepared actors through a kind of poetical treasure hunt each night.
The performance I saw featured actors Jade Anouka and Jonjo O'Neill making awe-inspiringly fluent work of these letters, settling into their rhythms in a way that quickly moved from awkwardness to utter naturalness. McDougall’s approach is full of play and wit, breaking up what could have been a very static exercise with outbreaks of poignant, surreal joy. O’Neill, as Lowell, opens a letter that instructs him to set up a kind of cliched romantic picnic: and when his attempts at wooing Bishop falter, he takes out a red rose from between his teeth and drowns it in a wine glass. Moi Tran’s set design is all about luscious surfaces (rich velvet curtains, an iridescent floor) and tongue-in-cheek theatricality: little apertures open up to reveal a collection of bottles that symbolise Bishop’s dive into alcoholism, or to shower wedding confetti.
These devices often feel hollow. And appropriately so. ‘Dear Elizabeth’ is as much about shortcomings as fulfilment: about letters that go missing, things that go unsaid, endlessly longed-for meetings and comfort that arrives too late. Lowell and Bishop express themselves in a way that often feels understated, offering congratulations on births, marriages, and deaths, and only managing to analyse their feelings for each other long after their first potency has faded. The night’s most satisfyingly intense moments come from their poems. Bishop’s famous refrain, in ‘One Art’, that ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’ resounds powerfully in Anouka’s reading, drifting across a stage that’s scattered with the debris of bygone decades and loves.
‘Dear Elizabeth’ is less like a dry literary exercise, and more like a haunted house, restoring power to emotional shocks sketched out in pen and ink.