Letters from Max – Hampstead Theatre Downstairs

Last Updated on June 3, 2025

Sarah Ruhl’s deeply personal account of her student’s battle with cancer moves like a song.

A young death is always a tragedy. There is none of the comfort of a long life well lived, nor the Stoic acceptance that all lives must, eventually, end. Instead, there is anger, denial, depression. But if there is beauty to be found in losing a loved one too soon, it is portrayed thoughtfully, musically, and poetically in Sarah Ruhl’s moving play, Letters from Max.

Letters from Max is the true story of the relationship between Sarah Ruhl and her student Max Ritvo, told through their real words in the letters they exchanged over numerous years. Max (Eric Sarakian) is Sarah’s (Sirine Saba) student in a playwriting class at college, instantly different from the others. They strike up a friendship predicated on the sharing of deep emotions and the exchanging of lyrical poems.

Theirs becomes a strong, bottomless love, continuing to grow as Max’s childhood cancer – Ewing’s sarcoma – returns while he is still in school. Together, they question the meaning of life, love, and death through poetry, performed like songs in a musical. Their poems – acting as a way of confronting and coping with Max’s slow and unbearable battle with cancer – come complete with a beautiful live cello accompaniment (Laura Moody).

Dick Bird’s clever staging, in a space well-suited to the play, splits the audience in two, a shiny black floor itself divided by a sheet of reflective glass. It allows the two characters to converse through it and to duplicate themselves, symbolic of both their physical and spiritual realities, only the former of which will inevitably deteriorate.

In amongst the abstractions and gorgeous descriptions of writing (“the scan of your mouth shows only poetry”), the soul (“heavens are all alike, the people who make them are all artists”), and soup (“soup is the food that most allows your mouth to approximate silence”), Max’s candid declarations of his condition – “I don’t have time!” – cut like a knife, but are few and far between.

The play is, effectively, a long exchange of poetry and mutual love, a celebration of the written word more than a conventional play about grief. The cello, which provides a backdrop to their art, adds a splendid theatrical element, literally lifting their words into the realm of music. The script is slow – the first half, in particular, drags – and if it were not for the cello, cleverly incorporated into the performance by director Blanche McIntyre, and the stunning performances of Sarakian and Saba one might think that this story would be better told in its original form of an epistolary book.

The play’s subject matter is tragic. But in allowing the viewer so deeply and personally into the unique bond shared between its characters, it is equally a celebration of a real man who gave more love in his 25 years than most people do in a lifetime. Letters from Max is a moving piece of poetry and an interesting piece of theatre.

23 May – 28 June

Hampstead Theatre
Eton Avenue
London
NW3 3EU