Letters from Max, Hampstead Theatre review - inventively staged tale of two friends fighting loss with poetry

In 2012, the award-winning American writer Sarah Ruhl met a Yale playwriting student who became a special part of her life. Out of their friendship she created Letters from Max, a 2018 book of their correspondence, then a play performed in New York in 2023.

On the page, it’s a piece with a level of diction befitting two poets who like to recite their latest work to each other, sometimes more like a poetry reading than a play. But interspersed is the sparky dialogue between the two, the skinny student in his early twenties and the established playwright, mother of three, two decades older. Together they share thoughts and witticisms about everything from love to soup. Now at the Hampstead, directed by Blanche McIntyre, the piece has been given an impressive staging that turns the venue’s small studio space into something more epic. 

It’s not accurate to call this a two-hander as there is a third presence onstage, a cellist, Laura Moody (pictured bottom, with Sirine Saba), whose contributions are as eloquent as any speech. Sitting to the side, she provides sharp strikes of the bow or slithering high notes. At one point it looked as if she would play chunks of the Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach, a piece Ruhl and Max bonded over when he asked if he could leave her class early that day to get over to see it at BAM in Brooklyn. Oh, and he would need time to eat properly first, part of his regime for maintaining the weight lost during his teenage bouts of chemo. 

For the Max Ritvo we are seeing suffered from Ewing’s sarcoma as a boy. It was soon to return, bigger and badder, while he struggled to achieve his dream of becoming a published poet. But this is far from a cancer diary, charting decline and grief. The focus is on what each friend brought to the other, the inspirational edge to their relationship. 

We watch as Max dates and falls in love, all the while in a torrent of poetry that bursts through his depleted frame. The scans and tests tell a darker story each time, but the man only stops talking when he literally starts running out of breath. Ruhl supplies a grounding sense, of domestic normalcy, spinning tales of sibling upsets at Harry Potter World that eventually end happily.

Max’s story does not end that way, but this is not a dirge-like occasion, cathartic though it may be. Hampstead is fortunate to have Eric Sirakian (pictured above left) playing Max, an actor who was in a class with him and witnessed first-hand his magnetic personality. Sirakian is neither tall nor skinny, but he has a dynamism that you can be confident Max had too, with a gleam in his eye and a way of mingling with the front row of the audience that doesn’t seem remotely performative. As Ruhl, Sirine Saba is equally convincing, presenting the author as an unshowy woman with a warm personality, great reserves of humour and intellect and a gift for friendship: a “great sense-making force”, as Max describes her. 

Elevating the staging even further is its design (by Dick Bird). At each end of the traverse seating are black shiny panels that reflect the action, one of which also stands in for a chalkboard. There is also a large perspex screen hanging down to waist height, dividing the stage lengthwise, which at first seems odd. But it soon shows its value as a way of reflecting the actors back at the audience (while blocking their view of the other chunk of audience facing them across the stage). This means the actors are always visible in the round, no matter where they are positioned.More intriguingly, the screen allows McIntyre to play with the idea that the characters have other selves, as at times two versions of the actor are visible, the real one and their reflection. They can also seem to be together while physically separated by the screen. This reaches a magical climax when Saba and Sirakian move their hands so they seem to be linked, if only in their reflection. Their separation by death is indicated, yet their hands spectrally connect, a sign of the indelible bond they have created, which seems to continue in Ruhl’s dreams. 

Despite its doomy trajectory, this is an uplifting two hours, full of resonating thoughts and the choicest way of expressing them. Max begins as an exuberant man for whom writing is all. As his health deteriorates, he comes to see the world as a clicking game run by machines, with people as its players. Yet when his poetry is finally published, the print run speeded up to beat his death to the finish line, his triumphant whoops of joy are truly a tonic. And although Ruhl’s grief is profound, her mind ticks on: is death, she muses, like the silence between movements in a concert? The two are a perfect image of the dynamic link between great friends, the teacher and the taught alternating roles, nurturing to the end.

• Letters to Max at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs until 28 June
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