Love Letters Straight From Your Heart

By
Uninvited Guests
Commissioned by
Battersea Arts Center, Arnolfini We Live Here, and Leeds Met Studio Theatre
Produced by
Fuel
Dates
25 Feb 2023
Artist/Company
Uninvited Guests

Let’s raise our glasses to long lost loves and current lovers, to mums, to dads and to absent friends.

Uninvited Guests staged an event that is somewhere between a wedding reception and a radio dedication show. Audiences spoke of their own and other’s loves – deep, passionate, ambivalent and unrequited – and dedicated songs to them. 

Your letters of love may become part of the show, romantic gestures or signs of friendship, shared publicly between us.

A celebratory revival to mark 25 years of Uninvited Guests and 75 years of Theatre at University of Bristol.

Uninvited Guests’ Love Letters Straight From Your Heart will be revived in a special performance to celebrate University of Bristol’s contribution to contemporary performance practice.

Love Letters is an intimate participatory event in which audience and performers offer dedications and declarations of love, past and present. It shifts between theatre and a real social event; dedications are spoken, toasts are made, speeches are given, songs are sung, and dances danced, on behalf of the audience and with them. For this performance, dedications will be invited that relate to memories of the company’s work or to people’s time at Bristol, relationships or friendships formed whilst studying in the Department of Theatre.

The performance will be accompanied by a presentation to reflect on 25 years of Uninvited Guests and look forward to future projects.

Created and performed by Uninvited Guests, who are Paul Clarke, Richard Dufty and Jessica Hoffmann

Produced by Fuel. Love Letters Straight From Your Heart was originally a BAC Scratch and Arnolfini We Live Here commission, also commissioned by Leeds Met Studio Theatre.

A Celebration of Contemporary Performance at University of Bristol

DO IT THEN. GO ON, DO IT. ONLY KIDDING showcases the cutting-edge work of two companies who emerged from the Department of Theatre in the 1990s and have been making innovative and thrilling performance for over 20 years. The day of performances and talks, celebrating the University of Bristol’s contribution to contemporary performance practice and practice-as-research, begins at4.00pm with a new work by Bodies in Flight, Unbox me!, introduced by Simon Jones, Emeritus Professor of Performance. At 7.00pm a presentation to mark the 25th anniversary of Uninvited Guests will be followed by a revival of the in-person performance of their popular show Love Letters Straight From The Heart.

 

"It is a marvelous piece of theatre that blowtorches away Britishness and forces you to feel. "

Time Out

"*****  You can't help but fall in love with it."

Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

"***** 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."

The Guardian

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Project History