Letters from Max review – rich reflections on life, death and nothingness from a poet who died at 25

Hampstead theatre, LondonSarah Ruhl’s stage adaptation of the book she wrote with her former student Max Ritvo, who died of cancer at 25, is smartly written if emotionally distantSarah Ruhl first knew Max Ritvo as a student of her playwriting class at Yale. He was a 20-year-old poet who had lived through paediatric cancer, Ewing’s sarcoma. The cancer came back and he died five years later but in that time Ruhl and Ritvo wrote letters to each other with thoughts on life, death, God, faith and nothingness. That became the basis of a book published in 2018, two years after Ritvo’s death.Now adapted for the stage, they form a kind of modern-day Aristotelian dialogue, written by Ruhl (who previously wrote the epistolary play, Dear Elizabeth). Under the direction of Blanche McIntyre, Max (Eric Sirakian) and Sarah (Sirine Saba) variously become teacher and student for each other, and of life rather than merely playwriting. They walk past or around each other, not touching but sometimes in close proximity. The intimacies are in their words. Continue reading...

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