Review by Cara Sandys

Rummaging around in a second hand shop in London, Paul Harry Allen, discovers a bundle of letters from the Sixties belonging to someone we only know as Cathy G.

As someone who spent most of my teenage years writing letters to various pen friends around the world (and still have most of their replies in a box under my bed) I was fascinated by the concept of this show. In age of texting, email and facebook, we have lost the art of writing letters, and when we receive one, it is a thing to be cherished.

I wasn't sure if the audience would share my empathy with the subject matter, though. Do others also long wistfully for the time when we looked forward to the postman delivering our mail, to the thrill of opening envelopes with stamps from foreign shores and the excitement of reading letters often in broken English,  a comic source in themselves.

Allen’s premise is similar to that of previous Fringe visitors the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, who found collections of unidentified slides in a junk shops and garage sales in America and set the images to music.

Aided by projection of the letters themselves, Paul narrates their content, allowing us to meet various hilariously naive romantic young French boys vying for Cathy's affections, American schoolgirls sharing their stories and most interestingly of all, a young teenage groupie, whose exploits with various famous musicians of the Sixties including members of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch and her obvious disdain for Cat Stevens and Jimi Hendrix, are fascinating historical records of a time when London was where it was all happening.

Perhaps we all wanted images, too, to see who Cathy was, to hear her adventures and to find out what happened to all these correspondents. The communication was all one way and it was Cathy's story that was missing.

However, the day I was at the show, an audience member told  Paul that she worked next to one of the addresses mentioned in the show and offered to investigate whether the current occupiers knew anything about who used to live there. With a bit of detective work, this could be a show along the lines of something Dave Gorman might have pursued.

Review date: 29 Aug 2010
Reviewed by: Cara Sandys