Correspondence

National Tour 2008

Pilot: Edinburgh Fringe

Writer: Claire MacDonald

Director: Patrick Morris

Designed: Stefanie Müller

Lighting: Nigel Edwards

Sound composition: Andrew Lovett

Cast: Jeremy Killick,  Stefanie Müller (Edinburgh)  and Cathy Naden (Tour).

A man and a woman board a train together. She pours coffee. He drinks brandy. She smokes for the first time in years. He smiles. Through the night, they exchange memories, stories and secrets. When the sun rises, everything has changed forever…

With nods to film noir, winks to French romantics and pouts at the surrealists, Correspondence is a stunning exploration of intimacy, betrayal and the borders we cross to reach someone else.

Correspondence opened at the Edinburgh Fringe and toured nationally in Autumn 2008 including at our home base, Cambridge Junction.

Claire Macdonald on Correspondence

I have always loved trains. Not just the romance of travel but the feeling of possibility they seem to offer – the endless film running outside the window, the wide skies, the sense of being in between this place and that, migrant, unsettled, telling stories.

Correspondence came out of a collision of ideas about travel and stories about who we are in trains like space – in hotels, in rooms and compartments and places that we occupy only temporarily, as guests, paying guests, passing through. I’ve always liked films and fiction about trains – North by Northwest, Mystery Train – and I’ve always liked plays that take the idea of telling stories in public places, places in which there is sudden and strange sense of intimacy. One of my favourite plays is Wallace Shawn’s My Dinner with Andre in which, nothing happens. Two men have dinner. They talk about a life in theatre. They go home. We witness them. We listen. We overhear.

I wanted to make a play in which a world of possibilities – places, things that might have happened, shared memories and emotions – erupt out of language – nothing else. Everything emerges from language itself – language makes the world.

That’s the start – ideas, feelings, emotions – coupled with a sense that the theatre always remains that magic space where language takes light and in the mouths and actions of actors, begins to add layers of other meanings, other glimpses, that emerge in the exchange that happens between two people. That’s the joy of it – the text begins the journey – absurd, fantastical, but oddly rooted in the very ordinary things that have happened to all of us – or someone we now, or someone who told us that story at a party and maybe we misremembered it, or wrote it down, or told it to that group of friends we went hiking with, that story, that one the one that starts here.

Correspondence Reviews:

Three Weeks – August 4th 2008

“A man and a woman gradually construct alternative realities in this absurdist drama that instantly transports you to a world of moody film noir.  The script is wonderfully balanced, changing continually in pace and tone.  Both actors deliver ever evolving situations with incredible skill, panache and a masterful grasp of the dialogue.  The set design is particularly impressive, suiting the mood perfectly, with the moonlight seeping through the fogged window, delivering us to wherever the performers dictate.  This is vibrantly important theatre from a supremely talented company delivered by some of the best performers of the festival.  The Fringe would be a worse place without them”

The Observer, Sunday 17 August 2008

“MacDonald offers many such beautiful moments, which endure long after the play has finished, like a string of lanterns glowing in the dusk. An outstanding performance of childlike exuberance from Jeremy Killick seals this as a show not to miss.”