“Humour, sharp wit, emotional resonance, and masterful storytelling.”
With a career of over 25 years, Luke Wright has been celebrated as a multihyphenate writer in both spoken and written forms. He has enjoyed an expansive stage career, earning awards across different disciplines, including a Fringe First, a Stage Award, and the Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. Later Life Letter, his new touring show, corresponds to his new book of the same name, and tells the story of his adoption through a series of vignettes that are funny, frank, affecting, and fascinating.
A brilliant storyteller and an electrifying performer, Luke Wright opened his performance with charisma, sharp comments, and beautifully curated words. It is quite amazing how the fusion of stand-up comedy and his poetry strikes an almost perfect balance, and how he could switch hats so freely in-between both forms. The movement between poetry and stand-up comedy brings exactly the right degree of authenticity and self-directed irony, offering sharp observation alongside emotional openness.
He takes us on an intimate journey of growing up and continually searching for a history lost to his childhood. The storytelling of his poetry feels deeply personal, honest, and compelling. Poetry as a form, particularly when performed, often carries a degree of opacity and theatricality; here, however, it feels truthful and sincere, precisely the right language and medium for his storytelling. The vignettes—of him and his brother, of the view outside his window, of the streets he was born on, and of the brick walls he was raised within—feel written with, by, and in the service of love. His words offer a powerful counterstatement to certain public gazes towards adopted children: a gaze that subtly others the experience of being raised by non-biological parents, framing it as a deviation from the norm. Through his poetry, he responds to such assumptions in a human, open, frank, and incisively sharp way—“adoption means belonging,” as he’s quoted in the show.
The moral he ultimately arrives at—that we choose our own story—sits comfortably within the show, though more than just a moral, it’s also an act of care and love. The poems draw on stories both his own and those passed on from his parents, yet they are also extensions of the love he received from an early age, from those who nurtured him as he grew up. Sharing these stories with audiences is an act of passing that love on. He reminds us that telling stories, to others and to ourselves, is an immensely powerful act, an act of love.