Past event
Date:
5-6 August 2023
Letters Live returned to the gorgeous Oxfordshire countryside for our 5th appearance at Wilderness Festival in August 2023.
Headlining the festival’s Talks and Debates programme, we will brought a top secret cast of exceptional readers, to breathe life into some of the greatest correspondence ever written. Read on to see which incredible letters our talented performers including Claire Foy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Taron Egerton, Louise Brealey, Noma Dumezweni, Emma Corrin and Dolly Alderton read to a packed audience in the Atrium.
Through this show we supported Choose Love who are the charity partner of the festival and close friends of Letters Live. We are proud to be able to support their vital work, and have done since 2016. See more on Choose Love here.
(Click dates to expand/collapse)
Alphabetti Spaghetti
Mrs J. Blackford to Viz
Not a line from you on my Birthday!
Jane Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle
It would be easier and pleasanter to drown myself
George Bernard Shaw to Various
I am left in quite the quandary!
Joe Lycett to Mark Carne
I write you from the regions of hell
Robert Burns Mrs Riddel
Nothing else matters
Peter Thompson to Clare Venables
Life isn’t a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown
K.A. Applegate to her readers
We hear that you have found a new Red Ape
Virginia Woolf to her sister
An idiot of the 33rd degree
Mark Twain to Salesman
Short gap for love-making
Humphry House to Madeliene
Dear Us
Toni Morrison to Black women
Give women the vote
Bertha Brewster to Daily Telegraph
Good-day, little rascal, pussy-pussy, little turned-up nose
Mozart to his wife
Gandhi was a great spiritual leader…
Jerry Emery to Guardian
I’m allowed to be a woman who ages
Dolly Alderton A reader
I am sure you will agree
Edith Sitwell to Mrs Almer
The answer is a resounding and permanent NO
Whitey to TV production company
Do they not understand?
Mr Drayton to The Journal
Like a tree in full bearing
Charlotte Bronte to W.S. Williams
I have had my eye on you
Simon Fallowfield to Mary Foster
Be proud
Elton John to himself
We all make mistakes
Sherrif Anwar to Julie and Brian
Vegetable people
E. Mullion to Viz
The rooms about us will grow cold and drab
Dirk Bogarde to Kathleen Tynan
How can you live like this?
Oliver Beale to Richard Branson
Enough is Enough
Marguerite Louise D’Orleans to Cosimo III De Medici
I love you—the way you always are
Zelda Fitzgerald to F. Scott Fitzgerald
We are in a climate emergency
Anne Taylor Guardian
I will end with a cordial invitation
Auberon Waugh to Lionel Grigson
I want nobody but you for my lover
Katherine Mansfield to John Murry
I’m getting too old for illness
Bruce Robinson to Richard E. Grant
It will be sunny one day
Stephen Fry to Crystal
The Stones are dirty and sloppy and they repugnate me
Kathy and Pam
You write the worst letters
Anais Nin to Henry Miller
Yours in science
Harvey Rowe to Scott Williams
My thoughts are with two remarkable women
Philip Woolcock to Telegraph
Shine, constantly and steadily
Caitlin Moran to Lizzie Moran
My pink cactus is probably going to flower
Adèle Eugénie Sidonie to Colette’s Husband
I’m going to mope about you in the bath
Dylan Thomas to Caitlin Macnamara
Batman is still and will continue to be a perfect physical specimen
Various to Batman