Heston in lame Love Letters

10 April 2012

Star vehicles don't come much less roadworthy than AR Gurney's broken-down correspondence course of a play, which trundles back into town with an enfeebled Charlton Heston in the driving seat.

Here, the course of a 60-year relationship is charted, in grossly sentimental and lazily undramatic fashion, by two actors seated behind a desk, reading out letters. It remains the only play in which a celebrity pair can get a round of applause simply by coming on and sitting down.

There's no need for a director, a set, or even for rehearsals. All that's required, given the cheesy sentiment of the so-called story, is a certain romantic frisson between the letterwriters. Stephanie Powers and Robert Wagner did it first in London, when Hart To Hart was more than just an embarrassing memory.

Ten years on, Charlton Heston is paired with his wife Lydia Clarke Heston, who became the bride of Chucky more than 50 years ago. One of Hollywood's longest marriages has been pressed into the service of a cheap and cheerless theatre-filler, turning the Haymarket into a retirement home for superannuated icons.

The story need not trouble us much, except to note that it focuses on America's WASP upper class, and has a nasty, reactionary undertone. Andy and Melissa are neighbours: he is well-off and stolid; she is extremely rich and flighty. We follow them from giggly childhood notes, through teenage trysts, to the torrid missives of a fatal affair in the autumn of their lives.

Quite apart from its offhand sniping at Jews, Cubans and Catholics, the script implies Melissa is doomed from the start. While Andy's diligence and devotion to the written word earn him a reasonably happy marriage and a Senate seat, Melissa's romantic profligacy, her puncturing of pomposity and her preference for the phone condemn her to alcoholism, psychosis and death.

But who cares about the plot? We're here to see the man who played Moses and Ben Hur, and he exerts a truly strange fascination. At 75, and following a hip operation, Charlton looks less than athletic. The beady stare and bulldog growl are still there, even though he loses his place in the script several times.

The part of "liberal Republican" Andy suits perfectly a man who has largely abandoned acting in favour of unfashionable, Right-wing activism. Heston has become more famous - or infamous - as spokesman for America's National Rifle Association than as a screen star, and this adds an eerie cast to his stolid, sedentary performance. Is that a bulge under the armpit of his baggy suit? Will he waste the guy whose mobile phone goes off?

Mrs Heston actually has the more interesting role, relatively. Beside Andy's pompous epistolary efforts, Melissa's rude, crude responses are a blessed relief. Part of the fun comes, of course, from hearing naughty words emerge from the mouth of a grandmother.

This is the shameful secret of Love Letters. While giving celebrities an easy ride, it also cheapens them: there is as much ridicule as reverence involved in watching the Hestons mumble their way through the lame, tame material laid out in ring-binders in front of them.

At the start, Heston helped his wife to her chair, and at the curtain call planted a fond kiss on her cheek - actions more sweetly moving than anything in Gurney's mawkish excuse for a play, but scarcely worth the ticket-price.

Love Letters

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