Love Letters is a play by to. R. Gurney, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama. It centers on two characters, Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, who each sit at their own table, as happens in some epistolary novels, writing to each other, for more than 50 years, cards, letters, and postcards recounting the hopes, ambitions, dreams, disappointments, victories, and defeats of two lives lived separately. Andrew will be elected senator while Melissa will never to succeed in becoming an artist and will eventually take her own life.

Press Review

Télérama January 15, 2014

A large mahogany table. At one side sits Gerard Depardieu (to left), with his powerful figure in a dark suit and white shirt; at the other is Anouk Aimée (to right), in a red dress, diaphanous complexion, dark hair, without a wrinkle. Beautiful, to almost 81 years old. She even bites her upper lip, like a beginner.

This is the sixth time she has starred in Love Letters, by American writer to.R. Gurney, and this may explain why the Lola in Jacques Demy's film always sports the same incredible a naivete.

Since the first performance in 1990 alongside Bruno Cremer, the actress has continued to embody the character, each time opposite a different actor: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Philippe Noiret, Jacques Weber and Alain Delon... They can change the tables (to times there are two small ones), the lights (to times the spotlights are on the protagonists, other times the light is diffused), the shape of the water jugs, glasses or glasses of the actors.

But the rest is always the same. As if it were still. And always susceptible to the sensibility of the theatrical work, even if it is a reading, of rather conventional American romance with its strings firmly in place.

From childhood to death, we follow the path of the two lovers who will never to succeed in living together. She is rich, frivolous and suffers from depression. He is a poor, hard-working man who will make it while plagued by self-doubt and lack of self-confidence. The two exchange letters from when they went to school. He is crazy about her, while she loves to tease him even though she will amply prove to him that she does not know how to be without him. They will never to be able to be together, as well as many before and after them.

The success of this epistolary exchange is due precisely to the failure that everyone has experienced at least once, to the most intimate memories it stirs, to the embodiment of our reflection from part of the actors on stage by the actors. But it doesn't matter. The audience knows that it is just an excuse to see these two actors facing each other. It is they who induce us to come to theater, and whom we admire more than the text itself.

And it is well worth the effort. The reading holds wonderful surprises; the text in Depardieu's hands is simply brilliant.

At first one is confused by the sweetness of his voice that contrasts with his imposing appearance. The voice of an angel encased in the body of a bull.

It almost seems as if there is an animal on the stage, a monster, something out of the ordinary, puzzling and intimidating, but soon inducing admiration and respect.

During the performance, at one point he becomes silent before his partner and her showy, graceful elegance. But then his subtle voice transforms. Sitting opposite to us, he suddenly expresses the innermost human contradictions.

A simple gesture with his glasses, or his arm extended toward his lost partner evokes thunder.

But always with the utmost lightness. He cannot say - as he did recently - that he is fed up with the theater. That is a lie. He is too detail-oriented to be, too respectful of the audience in his every word and even when he is silent, dreaming or during a short break.

The audience helps both enormously in this extraordinary performance.

For an hour and a half the hall is enveloped in religious silence. Viewers breathe to rhythm with the actors.

Every single spectator in the packed theater eventually stands up to show the actors their admiration. It is beautiful to witness an audience seduced and sharing in the same emotion. Almost as beautiful as these two legendary actors who give their best here.