We sat down for an exclusive interview with Noah Wild, an Oxford-based theatre maker and (fairly) recent university graduate. Their one-person play With All My Fondest Love goes on tour across the country following an acclaimed ★★★★ run at The Edinburgh Fringe.
The play is touring to venues in Oxford, London and Brighton this spring – Tickets here.
With All My Fondest Love is rooted in the letters and diaries of your grandparents. What first inspired you to turn their story into a piece of theatre?
I started writing With All My Fondest Love during my final summer of University. I’d had my heart broken and, struggling with all the complicated feelings that created, realised I was probably experiencing love for the first time. It was around that point that I chanced upon a box of my grandparents’ love letters in the loft, dusty and unread. My grandmother was married by my age, so I became interested in what it means to conceive of love at this young age and how our understanding of love might change across generations and our own lifetime.
Then, in the post, my uncle sent stacks of diaries written by my grandad. He was a strange diary writer: as soon as anything important happens, he stops writing. With no memories of my grandparents, these letters and diaries allowed me to discover a long, complex life story I’d never been aware of. But it’s those gaps that With All My Fondest Love is most focused on – can you really actually ever know your own family?
Your play brings together three generations through its storytelling. What have you learned about love and relationships from looking so closely at your grandparents’ lives?
One of my favourite sections of With All My Fondest Love unites my grandparents, parents and myself on a series of train journeys. At their core, each generation is comparable, even passing through the same train stations. However, my grandparents’ marriage doesn’t fall within our normal definitions of love, it was bumpy and open-ended. One of the play’s most moving moments explores terminal illness and love is expressed through simple actions of care, rather than grand romantic declarations. Love becomes harder to pin down in the later stages of their marriage but it’s always there, perhaps just redefined. That’s had a big impact on my own expectations of what a lifetime commitment to loving someone might involve.
How has working on this play changed the way you relate to your own family history?
It’s particularly changed how I relate to my grandmother, as she died eight years before I was born. Now, I think I have a much more human and nuanced connection to her life, in a particular an appreciation of how she managed to overcome neo-natal loss. I hope the complexity and contradictions of her character come across in the play.
What’s been most interesting, however, is to see my Dad re-evaluate his connection to his parents, discovering an interior life to his parents alongside him. So it’s been beautiful to share in these surprises and discoveries – particularly when they have challenged or contradicted how he has usually described his parents. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the first time he watched the play alongside his brother, that was a special moment!
Carrying a solo performance requires a unique kind of presence and stamina. What has been the most challenging and rewarding aspect of holding the stage alone?
It felt very awkward and lonely at first, as I really missed having someone to react to as an actor! We’ve just finished rehearsing for the upcoming tour, two years after the play was last performed and I’d forgotten how exhausting performing alone is. And sometimes I do wish I’d written less lines for myself to learn…!
But it is utterly amazing to hold a room completely in your own hands, slightly terrifying but thrilling. My grandfather, as a keen amateur actor and speech giver, would have loved to have his own one-person play, I think. So, something definitely runs in the family.
If someone is coming to the show knowing very little about it, what would you love them to experience?
I hope With All My Fondest renews an interest in your own family history. My favourite part of performing the play is hearing about the amazing grandparents of our audiences (many of which deserve a play all of their own!). Through uniting three generations together, it explores how people, at different stages of life, are able to pick themselves up after loss and keep on living. I think there’s something profoundly hopeful and redemptive in that. So overall the play feels like a long, warm hug, something emotional but deeply comforting. Tender is the perfect word to describe it!