‘Love Letters’ fascinates audience’

LAHORE: Imran Aslam’s smoky yet impassioned voice and the timeless classic ‘Love Letters’ by AR Gurney came together as a match made in heaven at the final day of the Lahore Literature Festival 2016, drawing an even bigger audience on the second and final day of its staging at the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) 2016.

Veteran journalist Imran Aslam and former artist and designer Rehana Saigol joined the elite club with greats such as Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones, Shabana Azmi and Farooq Sheikh on Sunday as their performance absorbed the audience hitting many a nerve.

The play was an epistolary, in the same vein as Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘Saleebein Mere Dareechey Mein’, where the story of two persons’ life unfolds by way of the letters they wrote to each other. The two characters of Gurney’s ‘Love Letters’, Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace start writing letters to each other and this conversation punctuated with the vicissitudes of life, spanning over 50 years, have been expressed by the writer’s masterful literary articulation.

As Imran and Rehana sat down at their respective tables, performing, one couldn’t help but be in awe of the fluidity with which both owned these characters. From the naïve young era of the two’s friendship to the subtle yet indisputable adore growing in the relationship, were all depicted exquisitely through expressions of anxiousness and excitement by both, using pace and pitch of their voice in a way that rendered visual illustration unnecessary.

The story of Andrew and Melissa isn’t a fairy tale by any standards. Both although connected at heart are pulled apart by life shortly after the spring season of their endearment, and as the letters un-scroll Melissa ends up tainted by a failed marriage and Andrew by the hollowing void of her absence. Yet the bond at their core keeps them conjugate above and beyond any worldly definition of love. The play strummed the most intricate of feelings in a rather intangible yet undeniable expression of what can only be described as the most incorruptible emotions.

The already spellbound audience was sucked even further into living the lives of Andrew and Melissa by the immaculate choice of songs that canvassed the colours and moods of different parts of the two characters’ life. From ‘Summertime’, by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong pringing fragrance of the spring to the atmosphere, the mix-box of ambition and passive insecurity in ‘My Boy Lollipop’ and ‘Straighten Up and Fly Right’ to the expression of pure longing and revolt in ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’ by Monroe, the music just could not be any better.

The play sunk more and more into melancholy and when the final lines after the death of Melissa, “I know now that I loved her”, were delivered by Imran Aslam, it tipped many over to teary eyes. The play ended with a deafening applause and it would be fair to say that AR Gurney would have been proud of the way his work of art was directed by Hameed Haroon and performed by Imran Aslam and Rehana Saigol.