Love Letters at Home

Dates
20 May - 17 Jul 2020

Project History

In response to our desire for connection in the times of physical distance, Uninvited Guests brought you a completely digital, wholly personal, and wonderfully live experience in Love Letters at Home.

In their innovative performance style, Uninvited Guests played with what was real and what was not, often inviting the audience to participate in different ways. By collecting song requests and dedications from the audience members, they created a show that was unique to each audience every night.

Love Letters at Home was an antidote to isolation. We raised our glasses to long lost loves and current lovers, to mums and dads, and to absent friends

Love Letters Straight From Your Heart was originally a BAC Scratch and Arnolfini We Live Here commission, also commissioned by Leeds Met Studio Theatre. Love Letters at Home was commissioned by First Art, a Creative People and Places project, as part of its Go the Distance remote festival for audiences in Ashfield, Mansfield, Bolsover, and North East Derbyshire.

About the Audience Experience

Love Letters at Home was an intimate participatory event in which the audience and performers offered dedications and declarations of love, past and present. It was collaboratively written with its audience, who temporarily became a community of close friends across the performance.

Once an audience member had booked their ticket, they were invited to send in a music request with a dedication to someone they love.

Audiences received a reminder email the day before with a password and Zoom link to attend. The performances lasted just under one hour.

#LoveLettersAtHome

""The dedications are manifestly authentic and heartbreakingly sincere. At the performance I attended, there were testimonies of love for an adored girlfriend; for a disabled child; for a paternally abused and suicidal sister. I don't think I have ever wept so much in a show, just seeing others quietly trying not to cry when it came to their contribution... The sense of collective sympathy created (without any group therapy chat) is profoundly comforting, and it's combined with surprisingly delightful light relief. Gaze into the eyes of the stranger opposite you for a full minute and enjoy a slow dance at the end.”"

Independent on Sunday

"“There is something so sincere and so utterly simple about Uninvited Guests' piece that you can't help but fall in love with it, not least because it makes you fall in love with everybody else in the room.... At one point Hoffmann recreates the million miles an hour rush of first love; at another Dufty, backed by Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, cries and shouts "I'm missing you" like a miserable dog howling at the moon. But the very heart of this show is the audience and their dedications, often written with an affecting poetic clarity as in the treatment of erectile dysfunction. Initially, you feel voyeuristic as loves and heartbreaks are revealed; after a while you simply feel part of a huge community as lives, hopes, dreams and sadnesses are offered up in a way that is blisteringly honest and unvarnished, but also entirely safe because of the anonymity.”"

Guardian *****

""Though each dedication will be specific to somebody in the room, the anonymity turns 'Love Letters' into a communal experience: at this mercurial show's best, every declaration of love and sorrow resonates with everyone in the room. It is a marvellous piece of theatre that blowtorches away Britishness and forces you to feel.”"

Time Out *****