Love Letters review, Theatre Royal, Windsor: Jenny Seagrove and Martin Shaw impress in a tale of almost-requited love

It’s remarkable how turret-touchingly close planes come to Windsor Castle on their groaning descent to nearby Heathrow. But perhaps the resulting noise blight is oddly reassuring at the moment for Her Majesty and family – a sign that life is returning to normal.

And the same, I think, applies to Love Letters, the reopening flourish for the (very nearby) Theatre Royal, Windsor, which is among the first regional venues to get actors trundling back across the boards again (with socially distanced but not temperature-checked audience watching, overall capacity down to 220 from the usual 633 seats).

There are moments during this protracted two-hander (which includes an interval) entailing a sedentary male/female epistolary exchange when you get the wearying sensation of people droning on, one missive after another winging its way over. But it’s a big comfort, all the same, to see two actors of note (in this case Martin Shaw and Jenny Seagrove) gainfully employed for a few days amid the kind of scattered gathering that would have been barely unusual at a pre-pandemic matinee.

When the piece got its UK premiere in 1990, a few years after it emerged Stateside, the late American playwright AR Gurney’s divertissement attracted cutting remarks galore from London’s critics. “It’s official,” sniped one, “Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers can actually read.” The Hart to Hart co-stars were conforming to a swiftly established casting modus operandi that trades on the fact that no one has to learn a script. It’s an evening that attracts well-known names – if professionally related, then good (eg Dallas’s Larry Hagman and Linda Gray), if personally involved, indeed married, even better (and more meta): Charlton Heston and wife (Lydia) were jeered by critics in the West End in 1999, but what a box-office coup.

Obviously, in terms of actorly challenge, we’re miles from Hamlet (which, fingers crossed, Ian McKellen will be performing here this winter). Yet it takes some skill all the same to engage us in the fictional life-stories of two friends, who across 50 years, share childhood confidences, grow close, lose and then re-find their amorous point of connection mid-life and count the pluses and minuses of their enduring, if wavering attachment.

Although it’s a mustily old-fashioned affair, the height of restraint, it can’t but help have a Covid-age flavour now: the sight of Shaw and Seagrove marooned behind wooden desks, black scenic void behind them, is quite 2020. As much as we bring our own relationships to the table here – the friendships that shifted into something more, the might-have-beens – there’s a new piquancy to the pangs of almost-requited love described. Lockdown has had its costs.

Shaw plays the over-named Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, bespectacled and stiff but relaying winning youthful enthusiasm and adolescent awkwardness before school swottishness and legal career-bound stuffed-shirtism takes hold. It’s never entirely clear what the richer, more rootlessly adventurous Melissa Gardner sees in him. Seagrove does a nice compensating line in sceptical wry attentiveness, drawling some of her non-plussed responses and crashing head to her desk when her buddy starts to bore on.

Some may object to the narrative arc – he forward-marches to become Republican senator, she’s left by the wayside, along with her artistic aspirations, to seek the self-destructive consolation of booze. But if the sting in the tale is writ too large, the letters contain a strong grain of truth about the way life-courses diverge. There’s a romance to setting down confidential thoughts and conflicted feelings on paper. A romance, too, in flinging open a theatre mid-pandemic to give those words an airing.

Until Oct 17. Tickets: 01753 853 888; theatreroyalwindsor.co.uk