Grandparents' love letters inspire one-man play

Uncovered diaries and hundreds of decades-old love letters have inspired a playwright to create a stage production showcasing his grandparents' "beautiful" story.

Noah Wild, from Banbury, Oxfordshire, said he discovered Harold And Marlene Wild's letters and diaries in the loft at his family home about two years ago.

Reading them allowed him to "experience love for the first time but in a way that didn't fit the norm", said the 22-year-old.

He is due to take his one-man play, With All My Fondest Love, on tour after first performing it at the Oxford Playhouse and Edinburgh Fringe in 2024.

The play centres on letters Harold and Marlene wrote to each other between 1952 and 1954, they year they got married, as well as Harold's diaries, which he filled out every year from 1942 to 2008, said Noah.

"I placed the play in a very specific moment in my life two years ago when I was coming to the end of university feeling quite heartbroken," he said.

"It's that interaction between my own love story, if I can call it that, with my parents' experience and my grandparents' too, and how those three generations connect in different ways."

Noah said the letters also made him feel closer to his grandmother, who died before he was born.

"It was this beautiful experience of reading these letters that [Marlene] began to write at the age of 17 and discovering someone who was almost exactly the same age I was, and working out what love and relationships meant to me in the modern world, rather than the 1950s," he said.

While both his grandparents took part in amateur theatre, he said he gets his playwriting ability from his grandfather.

"It is a very 'him' [Harold] thing to write a one person play," Noah said.

The play will return to Oxford at the Old Fire Station on 1 May before appearing at the Hope Theatre in London on 19 and 20 April, followed by the Brighton Fringe next month.

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