Dear Jack, Dear Louise at the Arcola Theatre – review

Dear Jack, Dear Louise is a sweet story full of wit and goodness and a sense that everything will be alright in the end.

Jack and Louise have never met: Jack is a doctor in the US army, and Louise is an actress in New York. Interested parties suggest that they might like to make each other’s acquaintance and, given there’s a war going on, they decide the best way to do that is to write to one another. So that’s what they do, from 1942 right up to VE Day in 1945.

The story is entirely epistolary, but while all the action is relayed to – rather than witnessed by – the audience, Preston Nyman, playing Jack, and Eva Feiler, as Louise, create a fizz of intimacy, yearning and yelping when the other doesn’t reply with enough haste, hesitating and double-guessing themselves in their responses.

While Louise and Jack are in vastly different surroundings, the focus is on the letter writing itself, and Robert Innes-Hopkins’s design reflects that: two writing desks dominate the stage, one a military green with a sturdy green typewriter, the other a wooden bureau with paper and theatrical quill to suit its owner. A room divider with numerous dresses strewn over the top gives a glimpse of Louise’s exciting city life, whereas Jack’s khaki backpack lies waiting for a less glamourous calling. Given there are maybe two costume changes for Louise (Jack remains in his khaki greens throughout), Innes-Hopkins does a lot with a little, her costumes evoking both the times and her particular joie de vivre.

It’s not avant-garde or breathtakingly original, and the end is given away by the advertised fact that the script is inspired by writer Ken Ludwig’s parents, meaning, of course, that they met at least once. But it’s not a heart-racing tension of will-they-won’t-they that keeps the audience beguiled, but rather a genuinely wholesome sense of goodness prevailing; of people trying to connect when it seems all but impossible.