Sir, – I rarely feel moved to disagree with a theatre review, but my view of The Speckled Peopleat the Gate Theatre was so different from that of Sara Keating (Life Culture, October 6th) that I thought it worth registering. So far from feeling that Hugo Hamilton's 2003 memoir lost subtlety in "the book's translation to the stage", it seemed to me that the adaptation, in Patrick Mason's superb production, was a brilliant theatrical reconception of the original.
So far from thinking Denis Conway’s father figure a “pantomime villain”, I found the strength of his performance (playing opposite the dazzlingly talented Julika Jenkins as the mother) lay in the wide open emotional vulnerability he revealed in the fascistic household tyrant. So far from encouraging a self-congratulatory audience reaction, I experienced the play as funny, moving and deeply disturbing, building to an ending that was anything but “sentimental”. Go see, and decide for yourselves. – Yours, etc,