Letters Home

Last year, there was a peculiar paradox to Grid Iron’s colossal site-specific Leaving Planet Earth. It sought to take us on an interstellar journey, but consequently affirmed our own sense of place and belonging. In Letters Home, a similarly epic but multinarrative work, we are taken from the groaunds of the Edinburgh International Book Festival to rooms in and around Charlotte Square, where we experience four epistolary fictions centred on the titular theme. In this new promenade piece however, it’s more difficult to really hone in on a sense of place.

Details by Chimanda Ngozi Adichie foregrounds LGBT rights as a gay female couple in Nigeria are split apart; Kamila Shamsie’s War Letters cradles us underneath four panoramic screens which play out a film about two Punjabi soldiers battling through the First World War across continents; Christos Tsiolkas’ Eve and Cain channels a savage argument between the pair told through slave messengers; and Kei Miller’s England in a Pink Blouse, which seats us blindfolded on board an aeroplane, reveals the thoughts of a mother estranged from her son.

The braided proportions that link these four works are often centred on themes of despondency and confusion. In Details, Chisara and Oyin focus on minutiae that deflects how they really feel, which clashes hard against the direct and more tortuous exchanges shared by Eve and Cain over the mercilessness of their God. But as well as the promenade aspect coming across as too logistical and regimented, many of the conclusions are far too on the nose for a work of such nuanced and delicate synthesis.