I have a large TV-sized box filled with letters that friends wrote me while I was at school, stored in the roof of my parents’ house.  I can’t bring myself to throw them away.
Playwright, producer and director Juliet O’Brien loves letters too. She can’t remember the last time she received one, no wait, it was probably from her mother. She says it is sad how the centuries old form of communication has been overwritten by the instantaneousness and immediacy of email, and the convenience of Skype.
But her new play The Letter Writer, which tells the story of an illiterate political exile writing to his wife through a l’ecrivain public (meaning ‘ public writer’ in French), reveals the art has not died altogether.  Before she penned the show in France, O’Brien was surprised to discover professional letter writers, and interviewed several as research.
Some described writing wedding speeches, others wrote cover letters for CVs and another wrote a biography of the lives of a woman’s children.
“It’s a fantastic profession [that helps] people who don’t have the power of words,” she says. One writer she spoke to said her hardest job was writing a wedding speech for someone who didn’t want the couple to get married. In the end the letter writer realised it had become “a hate/vengeance thing” and told them to deal with it another way.
“Letter writers must feel like therapists because people end up talking about their lives,” O’Brien says. “[The letter writer] has to put themselves in a person’s skin when they are writing things like speeches. You want the words to sound like the person saying them.”
The Letter Writer will debut in New Zealand during the NZ International Arts Festival, after it enjoyed three seasons in France.
O’Brien says the Wellington premiere is important to her because this is where she grew up. The former St Mary’s and Victoria University student moved to France when she was 24 and is still living there 20 years later.
“To create universality” the play is set in two fictitious countries, says O’Brien.
“I didn’t want people to say ‘that situation happened on whatever date’, I want people to walk away and say ‘that is the case in so many different countries’.”
The play is a reminder that “there is nothing like sitting down to write a letter on an empty piece of paper”.
Dawn Tratt
The Letter Writer, Circa Theatre, March 7-21.