For their latest outing, Bristol’s Uninvited Guests invite you to a party where they’ll play your favourite love songs. Steve Wright makes a dedication.

It’s somewhere between a wedding reception, a wake and a live radio show. It’s collaboratively authored with its audience, who become a temporary community of close friends. We take requests and dedicate songs to those you love and care for. And we try to express the inexpressible, to speak of love without irony, through those oft-repeated words that are so hard to say face-to-face or for the first time.” This is Jessica Hoffmann, co-founder of Bristol performance company Uninvited Guests and co-performer of their most recent triumph, the simple yet affecting ‘Love Letters Straight From Your Heart’.

Devised at Leeds Met Studio Theatre and Arnolfini, Bristol (where the Guests, who formed in 1998, are associate artists), ‘Love Letters’ was premiered at Battersea Arts Centre in 2007, since when it has toured its emotive magic around the country – including a much-praised run at 2009’s Edinburgh Fringe. Next weekend, the Guests bring the show to the Tobacco Factory for two nights. Audiences should prepare for a touching and, if a string of heartfelt reviews and blog posts is anything to go by, a hugely cathartic evening.

The show’s concept is simple enough. Audiences arrive in a room that’s been arranged as if for some kind of celebration (a wedding feast, perhaps – though we are also told that, for the purposes of the show, tonight is that most emotive of dates in the calendar, Valentine’s Day), and offered a glass of sparkling wine and a seat along either side of a long table.

Performers Jess Hoffmann and Richard Dufty, seated at either end with turntables, then start spinning a series of short excerpts from pop’s romantic canon – interacting with each other all the while like a long-married couple, smiling benignly on each other’s foibles and musical tastes. Then, over the next 75 minutes Hoffmann and Dufty play songs and read out dedications made anonymously by that evening’s audience. (Before the show, attendees are invited to send the company a song dedication via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , telling them what the person means to you and why you’ve chosen this piece of music). The audience sit sipping their bubbly, while their individual dedications are read out. At moments, sections of these dedications are enacted, around the room, by Hoffmann and Dufty. And, by the end, an entire audience is, as often as not, moved to tears, dancing and more – all from the simple recourse of putting a bunch of people in a room together and sharing their musical landmarks, with all the images, memories, stories, hopes, dreams and regrets that attend them.

At moments you’ll find yourself staring into the face of the audience member opposite you while these emotive songs play and the lighting dulls. Too close for comfort, perhaps? Rather – to judge from audience members’ and reviewers’ comments – softly, insidiously moving: even, for weary, cynical, recession-worn audiences, a brief reminder of the power of pure, undamped emotion.

“It sounds like a droll gimmick,” commented a reviewer for the Independent. “Yet the dedications are manifestly authentic and heartbreakingly sincere. At the performance I attended, there were testimonies of love for an adored girlfriend; for a disabled child; for a paternally abused and suicidal sister. I don't think I have ever wept so much in a show, just seeing others quietly trying not to cry when it came to their contribution.”

The Guests formed in Bristol in 1998. “Our work plays with what’s real and what’s not, combining high and low tech and often inviting the audience to participate in different ways,” Jessica explains. “We use found source material to reflect the world back out to our audiences. Recently, our work has blurred the line between theatre and social festivities, with audiences joining us in events that are celebratory and elegiac, nostalgic and critical of these times.  

“In this event, we are mediums channelling love, meeting points through whom your intimate expressions pass. We cast ourselves, and you, into the stories of song lyrics. Words meant to be spoken one-to-one are witnessed publicly and words that were meant to be read (written for your eyes only) are given voice. By collecting song dedications and the stories attached to them from the audience members of each show, we create a performance that is unique to each audience every night.

“We make others’ declarations of love our own, say them like we mean them, as though we’ve felt all the greatest loves and losses in the world. The show draws on individual and collective nostalgia. It’s your show, a live mixtape, only played the once. We get beyond the familiar songs and clichéd loving phrases, and share some real emotions.”

LOVE LETTERS STRAIGHT FROM YOUR HEART WAS AT THE TOBACCO FACTORY, BRISTOL FROM SAT 22-SUN 23 JAN. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2011 

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