Letters Home

A gem of a play adapts the letters of Sylvia Plath to her mother, back home.  Sylvia's early death, led to a particular interest in her life, as well as her work.  Her mother published these letters in an effort to provide her readers with a better understanding of her daughter.   This intensely moving play will suit the intimate atmosphere of the studio perfectly.

You can't have missed the literary and media frenzy caused by the publication of Birthday Letters and the death of Ted Hughes. What better time then to present the dramatic rendition of Sylvia Plath's letters to her mother, Aurelia? Love, duty, pain, resentment an emotional feast!

Sylvia Plath was already recognised as a brilliant poet when she took her own life, at thirty, in 1963. Since that tragedy, and in part because of it, interest in the details of Sylvia's life and her marriage to poet Ted Hughes has kept pace with the growing interest in her work.

Sylvia left behind 696 letters written to her family between the beginning of her college years in 1950 and her death in 1963, a sizeable majority of which were addressed to her mother, Aurelia. Aurelia published a huge volume of these letters home, with spare but meaningful commentary, and every word of the play is drawn from that book. The play traces Plath's journey from exuberant entry into Smith College in 1950, via her first suicide attempt in 1953 (following her failure to win a place on a prestigious writing course at Harvard), a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge, the eventually unsuccessful marriage to Ted Hughes and to her early death in London in 1963. But while the most obvious value of the piece lies in the information it imparts, it also works interestingly in its depiction of a mother/daughter relationship, rooted in genuine love and concern, but bedevilled by unacknowledged minor resentments and incomplete comprehension.