CILLIAN MURPHY и поколението 30-годишни, които не се страхуват да бъдат различни

    At the end of this month Benedict Cumberbatch will take to the stage of the Freemasons’ Hall in central London to give a public reading of a letter by Alan Turing to his friend and fellow mathematician Norman Routledge.
    Written in early 1952, shortly after Turing had been charged with gross indecency with another man, it affects a breezy matter-of-factness typical of those repressed times: “I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered quite a possibility for me.” Yet a terrible anguish lies beneath and he closes, “Yours in distress, Alan”. Turing was found dead two years later.
    Cumberbatch, who played the pioneering computer scientist in The Imitation Game, is one of the prime movers behind Letters Live, an initiative to stage live performances of literary correspondence.
    Cumberbatch has become an enthusiastic advocate of the power of the written letter: “It’s a privilege to read and hear this most ancient of communications live to an audience,” he says.
    “Letters Live makes us pause and imagine the lives behind the letters read and the circumstances of their origin.”
    There will be five nights of readings at the Freemasons’ Hall, featuring an array of actors, musicians and public figures. The publisher Jamie Byng, the driving force behind the venture, will reveal only a couple of names of those taking part. “We will not be confirming on which nights any other performers will be appearing, which will give each night a lovely spontaneous feel,” he says.
    On previous occasions Gillian Anderson, Juliet Stevenson, Nick Cave, Matt Berry, Caitlin Moran, David Nicholls, Stephen Fry, Ian McEwan, Viv Albertine, Russell Brand and Rob Brydon have performed.
    The other confirmed performer this time is Louise Brealey, Cumberbatch’s co-star in Sherlock. She will read a letter that appeared in The Times in March 1912 in response to a long and pompous missive from the bacteriologist Sir Almroth Wright, which had argued that women were psychologically and physiologically incapable of having anything to do with politics.
    “I have been so much impressed by Sir Almroth Wright’s disquisition,” the correspondent wrote, “backed as it is by so much scientific and personal experience, that I have come to the conclusion that women should be put a stop to.” It was signed “CSC ‘One of the Doomed’ ”, who turned out to be the 26-year-old Clementine Churchill, Winston’s young wife.
    Cumberbatch and Brealey will also combine to read from the wartime love correspondence of Chris Barker and Bessie Moore. “Standing up there and speaking words written during the Second World War by Bessie Moore — words that were not meant to be spoken aloud even to her lover — is an electrifying privilege,” says Brealey.
    “It doesn’t feel like acting; you have to try to get out of the way. I have rarely felt so close to someone I’ve never met.”
    An enthusiasm for the letter may seem a little misplaced in this digital age, when we appear to have largely abandoned committing ourselves to paper and send some 300bn emails every day, not to mention the countless texts and tweets on social media.
    In fact it was a digital initiative that sparked the resurgence of interest in the written form. Back in 2009 the writer Shaun Usher, who had become hooked on famous correspondence, started putting his favourite examples on a website he created called Letters of Note. From the start he realised the correspondents did not have to be famous or even well known to fascinate. Indeed, the first letter he put up was the reply that an aspiring female animator had received from a Disney employee in 1938: “Women do not do any of the creative work … The only work open to women consists of tracing.”
    Usher’s online archive expanded rapidly to well over 1,000 letters from across the centuries. He characterises it as “written by the famous, the infamous and the everyday Joe. They include rousingly defiant letters from freed slaves to their old masters; beautifully composed letters of advice from idol to fan; heartwrenching letters to deceased loved ones from those left behind; unbearably gripping letters that offer first-person accounts of seemingly unremarkable moments in history; and — purest and most touching of all — the simple declarations of love. Collectively, these perfectly formed time capsules capture every human emotion.”
    The website attracted more than 1.5m visits every week and Usher now also has 189,000 followers of his @LettersOfNote Twitter account. In 2013 he published an anthology, Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience. It became a bestseller. It is this book along with another that came out around the same time, Simon Garfield’s To the Letter: A Journey Through a Vanishing World, that provided the inspiration and much of the material for the Letters Live events.
    Garfield’s book is a historical survey that lays bare what it is that we find so compelling about letters. One of the attractions can be a letter’s immediacy as an eyewitness record of great events, as when Pliny the Younger describes the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii, with people fleeing in panic, clutching pillows to their heads to keep off the ash. “Of course,” says Pliny, “these details are not important enough for history.”
    As the literary critic John Carey has said: “We want personal history, not the official version, and only letters give it.”
    Garfield draws out the oddities of correspondence, quoting the shortest letter: Victor Hugo’s to his publisher inquiring about the success of Les Misérables. Hugo wrote simply: “?” As the book was proving a success, the publisher replied: “!”
    Garfield’s masterstroke, as identified by Carey, was to intersperse his historical survey with a collection of letters written by a British couple: Chris, a former post office clerk now, in 1943, a signalman with the army in north Africa, and Bessie, a post office worker in Blackheath, southeast London. They start off as friends and gradually fall in love. “I want to be very, very tender and gentle towards you — and, too, very rough,” Chris writes eventually. “I want to be your mistress, to be used to the uttermost,” Bessie replies. Their correspondence has now been published as a book in its own right, My Dear Bessie: A Love Story in Letters, edited by Garfield.
    Carey identifies what is so powerful about these letters and thus what it is that draws us to them. What is remarkable, he says, “is how well their letters compare — in decency, sincerity, humanity — with the famous lovers in Garfield’s collection. Henry VIII, drooling over Anne Boleyn’s ‘pretty dukkys’ [breasts], and boasting of the wildlife he has slaughtered, is egregiously nauseating.”
    Some now argue that there is no reason email and other digital forms cannot be regarded as the same as a letter on paper. Thus in 2010 Salman Rushdie sold the contents of his old computer to Emory University in Atlanta.
    Yet although we are told that once something is out on the internet it’s there for ever, we are beginning to realise that may not be true. Floppy and laser disks are long obsolete. CD-Roms slowly disintegrate; hard disks give up. Ben Macintyre recently wrote about having half a novel “saved” on a 3.5in floppy disk, but having no way to access it. In 10 years’ time will your USB and memory cards still be usable?
    It is not, of course, merely for their archival stability that we cherish letters. As Usher has said: “If I’m reading an email I’ve always got my eye on something else. But if a letter comes through the door I’m always in awe that someone has taken the time and made the effort.”
    Cumberbatch has become passionate about letters. “They are the poetry of means of communication,” he says.
    “The relationship between the audience, reader and writer on a Letters Live night helps deepen our understanding of these inspiring artefacts of the human condition. They are windows into the love, beauty, pain and humour of their creators and recipients.”
    When I sailed across the Atlantic, my wife could have pinged emails to me. Instead she hid a package of individually sealed letters in my kit with instructions about the dates on which they could be opened. It felt much closer.
    As Katherine Mansfield wrote: “This is not a letter but my arms around you for a brief moment.”