Epistolary novels were all the rage - you know, before the telephone, which then became the iPhone. Jane Austen’s Lady Susan is, in my view, her best work; however, how does that format transfer to theatre, with all its in-person immediacy?
West End/Broadway big cheese Ken Ludwig chose the Arcola’s intimate venue and long-time collaborator director Simon Reade for his most personal and small-scale work. Premiering in the US in 2019 and based on his own parents’ letters during the Second World War it touches down in Dalston. We see a flurry of correspondence back and forth between Jack and Louise.
Ludwig’s adaptation of the letters is crammed full of bubbling humour, cresting waves of emotion, and the intense stress of wartime on human beings and relationships. Dramatic irony around personalities, dates and outcomes keeps us chuckling, and both characters are evenly mapped out and conscientiously embodied.
Preston Nyman is a dependable, quietly valiant Doctor Jack on the eve of war, writing to a girl he has never met because their parents are friends. Eva Feiler is Louise, a sparky, passionate actress living in New York, slowly falling for a man she can only imagine while pursuing her dreams of stardom. Andrea Fudge’s accent coaching gets both Brits pitch-perfect - no small task for Louise’s Brooklyn-Jewish twang.
Set designer Robert Innes Hopkins provides writing desks (obviously) and letters hanging from an army camouflage net overhead - again, rather expected. Lighting designer Richard Williamson supplies flashes of incendiary bombs, accompanied by bangs from Jamie Lu’s sound design, but the war, when it descends, never seems to penetrate the room.
Sam Spencer Lane’s choreography is a challenge. With his work on The Last Five Years - a two-hander with not much happening - it shouldn’t be an issue. The problem is that there is no singing here, and the square blocking from Reade, followed by some half-waltz two-steps, doesn’t drag us into the narrative.
I normally avoid Second World War pieces, as I feel that in the West we get misty-eyed, and this glorious nostalgia clouds our judgement. The stories we tell are very often the same: heterosexual and white - a quietly heroic soldier and a chipper but struggling woman stoking the home fires. I’m not saying that didn’t happen - clearly some of it did for Ludwig’s parents - but do we need two more hours of it? (See Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes or even Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall for alternative examples.)
There are only two routes it can go down, and when it travels upwards, the heartstrings are tugged - you’d be an automaton if they weren’t. Strong performances and writing mean that the bumps along the way are felt, but I question the premise and the background creative choices. The narratives we curate about this rightly oft-talked-about but rarely understood conflict lack nuance and tend to slip into a pastiche of themselves with Dear Jack, Dear Louise being another casualty.
Dear Jack, Dear Louise
Until 2 May 2026
Arcola Theatre
24 Ashwin Street
E8 3DL
