Review: Later Life Letter by Luke Wright. Purcell Room, Southbank Centre
★★★★⯪
Part confession, part therapy session, part poetry recital — a one-hour meaning-of-life show that sends the audience into emotional somersaults, from crying to laughing and back again.
Don’t come to Luke Wright’s show if you’re not prepared to watch people around you cry. And then laugh. And then do both at once. Later Life Letter whips the audience into shape like a very good comedian, then drops them into the emotional abyss of a Nick Cave song.
It’s a one-hour show about life, which sounds unbearable until you realise Wright knows exactly what he’s doing — and, crucially, what he’s not doing. This is not rambling confession; Wright turns his own life inside out — adoption, family, class, luck, the search for unconditional love — but does so from a place that feels settled, even grateful: a security of love poured into Luke and his brother by their adoptive parents, and that’s the key to earning the audience’s trust. Later Life Letter isn’t about pain so much as about looking at it properly — the way a therapist might, if they actually wanted you to come back next week.
The title refers to a later life letter: a document written by a social worker for an adopted child to read when they’re older, explaining the circumstances of their adoption. Wright takes that idea and runs with it — sometimes literally, sometimes sideways. The form slips easily between stand-up, poetry reading and something closer to memoir. If “stand-up memoir” isn’t officially a genre yet, this show makes a strong argument for it.
He talks about being adopted and growing up with a younger brother (who, he notes with good timing, runs a hotel and makes more money than a poet — life is cruel like that). He returns to the question of why he was given up, and what that knowledge does — or stubbornly doesn’t do — for you later on. There’s the moment of finding his birth mother on Facebook; there’s a half-brother who MCs drum’n’bass shows; and then there’s the sudden eruption on stage when Wright launches into it himself, grabbing the microphone and pushing his voice somewhere rawer and louder. It’s both chaotic and uplifting, drawing a storm of applause from the audience. What if his mother had kept him on that estate? What if it could have been him on the world stage, baseball cap snapped back, shouting into the mic? And then the quieter realisation underneath it all: isn’t his life on stage as a poet simply another version of that same life?
He keeps circling these imagined alternatives — growing up in Highgate versus a council estate near Hackney — and the strange pull of parallel lives, questioning whether replaying those what-ifs ever actually gets you anywhere.
What’s impressive is how carefully he avoids turning this into a self-pitying monologue. At moments it edges close to a therapy session — especially when he pulls out a notebook to jot down a definition of a “primal wound” — but it always feels exploratory rather than indulgent. He isn’t asking for sympathy. Instead, he opens a space where the audience starts quietly lining up his experiences with their own, even if their lives couldn’t be more different.
The most affecting moments come when he talks about unconditional love. About searching for it for most of your life, and then realising it’s been there all along. About his adoptive mother — her pain at not having children of her own, and her determination to give the ones she adopted the life she never had.
The Purcell Room suits the show perfectly: a small hall, nowhere to hide, just a bare stage. It plays to Wright’s commanding presence and works entirely in his favour.
By the end, the audience has been through emotional somersaults — genuinely, from tears to laughter and back again. If that sounds exhausting, it isn’t, but it does ask something of you. And if you’re prepared to sit in a room full of people quietly recalibrating their own stories, then Later Life Letter is very much for you.
Full UK tour dates and venues:
https://www.lukewright.co.uk/later-life-letter
Photos: Emily Fae
Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
