Theatre

All art is ultimately audience manipulation but I don’t know that I have ever seen a piece that operates so transparently yet impacts so devastatingly as ‘Love Letters Straight From Your Heart’, an astonishing tear-jerker by Uninvited Guests. Jess Hoffmann and Richard Dufty are our hosts at a gathering, 'in this room [where] it is always Valentine’s'. Their reading of audience-written song dedications to loved ones forms the meat of the evening. The pair (who have a sort of everycouple chemistry) make their own interjections, which serve as a framework to guide the ever more emotive tone: from Hoffmann’s giddy early race around the room accompanied by Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love (dedicated to her teen self) to Dufty’s pained, fiercely internalised dance at the climax.

But it’s the audience-written portions that prove the most affecting. The stories would undeniably be touching in isolation – likewise the songs – but the success of the production lies in Uninvited Guests’ faith in audience honesty and immaculate sequencing of the results. We move from dedications to partners, to one for a sister recovering from a suicide attempt, on to the deceased and missed. Fanned by the music and increasingly melancholic performance sections, given universality by the anonymity of the dedicators, the emotion in the room builds relentlessly. Uninvited Guests have created an environment that strips away the refuges of cynicism or detatchment: tears are the only honest response. It’s very definitely manipulation, but not cheap melodramatic button-pressing. It manipulates us into surrendering to the full possible force of our feelings, for ourselves and for others. There is no way that could ever be a bad thing.

'Love Letters Straight From Your Heart' played at McEwan Hall, Bristo Square, Edinburgh.