Poetic Talent and Letters Before Dying
“Maybe I have just written ‘There is No God’ in silver letters across the sky. That I could believe. But I don’t know if I get to carry the torch of my fear into the night I am heading into.”
Max
Playwright and author Sarah Ruhl (Sirine Saba) met Max Ritvo (Eric Sirakian) when he applied to her creative writing course at Yale. He was dead five years later from Ewing’s Sarcoma, a cancer that affects children. Through his teens he had chemotherapy to put the cancer into remission but it came back.
Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo had planned to publish their letters as a book which happened and this play is Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation. I was set to thinking about poets and early death, how creativity is realised but life is all too brief. John Keats also died at the age of 25 as did Max Ritvo.
There are times when Letters From Max can feel like a poetry reading but what makes it different is the cellist (Laura Moody) playing a response to what is being said conveying a sonic mood and the remarkable direction from Blanche McIntyre. A glass hangs between the audience seated on either side of the close up auditorium in Hampstead’s smaller space downstairs.
At times we see the actor or the audience opposite, or the actor and his reflection, which puzzled me as to how the hanging screen was sometime mirror, see through mirror or glass but the effect is spiritual. This staging makes one reflect on mortality and beauty as these images transfix.
Max and Sarah’s lives are very different, Sarah is in her forties with three children to care for, Max is in his twenties and tells us about his dating life. She tells us about Harry Potter World with all three children in wizarding costume when one spills warm Butterbeer on his wizard robes and cries inconsolably. Until he is given some vomit flavoured Every Flavour Beans and re-enters the world of his imagination.
They discuss at length the afterlife and belief in it. Sarah and her Catholic friend believe and Max describes that as imagination. There is so much to think about in this play that I think you will likely want to follow it up by reading some of Max’s poetry with its wit and vision.
Production Notes
Letters From Max
Written by Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo
Adapted by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Blanche McIntyre
Cast
Starring:
Sirine Saba
Eric Sirakian
Creatives
Director: Blanche McIntyre
Information
Running Time: Two hours and 10 minutes with an interval
Booking to 28th June 2025
Theatre
Hampstead Theatre
Eton Avenue
Swiss Cottage
Tube: Swiss Cottage
Reviewed
by Lizzie Loveridge at
Hampstead Theatre Downstairs
on 2nd June 2025