Play: Lettice and Lovage

Overview

Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage is a comic, bittersweet play that pairs extravagant storytelling with a quietly moral center. First staged in 1987, the play follows an exuberant, larger-than-life tour guide whose habit of embellishing history sets off a chain of events that tests the value of imagination against the strictures of ordinary civility. Shaffer balances broad comedy and pointed emotional insight to ask why invention can be both enriching and dangerous.

Plot

Lettice Douffet is an outspoken, theatrical tour guide at a drab English country house who livens up visitors with flamboyant, fictional anecdotes. Her imaginative liberties finally land her in trouble and she is dismissed from her post. That dismissal brings her into contact with a more buttoned-down museum official, Lotte Schoen, a woman whose insistence on facts and propriety initially clashes with Lettice's exuberance.
As the two women form an uneasy friendship, Lettice's freewheeling fantasies begin to crack Lotte's armor of restraint. Lettice stages a bold, unauthorized attempt to restore dignity and romance to a neglected manor by inventing a lavish, romantic past for it, hoping to rescue the spirit of the place and to redeem herself. Her theatrical interventions provoke scandal, awkward revelations and legal scrutiny, but they also unlock long-stifled truths about loneliness, grief and the need for human warmth.

Themes

At the heart of the play is a meditation on storytelling: the ways it can animate the present, comfort the lonely and create community, and the ways it can deceive or offend when misapplied. Shaffer poses no simple answer, instead showing the moral ambiguity of invention; Lettice's fabrications are at once consoling and irresponsible, a kind of art that both heals and risks harm.
Another persistent concern is the healing power of eccentricity. Lettice's flamboyance functions as a therapeutic force that dislodges routine and grief from the people she touches. The play also explores aging and friendship, suggesting that imagination can be a form of resistance to desiccation and a route back to joy for characters who have been hardened by loss or convention.

Characters and Style

Lettice herself is a showy, mercurial figure whose comic bravado masks a tender need for connection and recognition. Opposite her, Lotte embodies cool civility and a nervous attachment to facts, creating a dynamic that oscillates between farce and poignant intimacy. Supporting characters, officials, puzzled tourists and legalistic functionaries, provide a chorus of common sense against which Shaffer tests his two protagonists.
Shaffer's language mixes sharp, witty dialogue with theatrical flourishes; scenes are staged to highlight the contrast between Lettice's performative energy and the stolid world she disturbs. The play's tone slips artfully between comedy and elegy, using laughter to expose vulnerabilities rather than merely to amuse.

Reception and Legacy

Lettice and Lovage became best known for the central comic performance it affords, and productions have often been vehicles for celebrated actresses drawn to the role's theatricality and emotional depth. Audiences and critics alike have praised its sparkling humor and its humane undercurrent, even when some have questioned the ethics of Lettice's deception. The play endures as a witty, tender examination of how invention shapes memory, identity and human connection, reminding viewers that a generous imagination can be both a source of mischief and a balm for the lonely.