84 CHARING CROSS ROAD. To 19 June.
84 CHARING CROSS ROAD
by Helene Hanff adapted by James Roose-Evans Tour to 2004
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 8 April at Royal Theatre Northampton
Not cutting-edge but warm-hearted and civilised without being enervated - and a must for lovers of good books.This is a love story whose two main, real-life characters remained an ocean apart. But platonic affection was fuelled by US scriptwriter Helene Hanff's love of the England she never visited till, ironically, she published her correspondence with Frank Doel of antiquarian booksellers Marks and Co at the eponymous London address.
By then Doel was dead as, the play suggests, was the way of life which gave birth to the epistolary relationship. Without Hanff's American oomph the regular customer might never have become a friend, supplying meat and nylons during Britain's post-war ration years. Yet Doel's reserve gave his foreign correspondent something off which to bounce her enthusiasm for Elizabethan verse and Romantic prose.
Adapter/director James Roose-Evans' accomplished script treats the correspondence as a conversation, with facial reactions to words sent across the Atlantic. The most marked reactions come, fittingly, from the premises of Marks & Co as US openness assaults English reserve.
Starting in 1949, pre-war Anglo-Saxon attitudes rule. Doel only slowly divests his formal restraint it's moving as well as comic to see the way his letters' insistence he writes for Marks & Co' gradually becomes less automatic as Hanff's energy gradually affects him. Informality struggles with tradition in the pauses before his vocal signature' until eventually he explains that copies of all correspondence are kept in office files and must be duly correct to the inspecting eye.
Post-interval, time travels faster and age signifies - in death, departures abroad and in William Gaunt's Doel slowing, stooping and taking deliberate breaths in his ever-present coat and scarf. New assistants bring a new age, deference (lesser assistants only dared correspond with Helene behind Doel's back) being kicked aside by insouciance as the Beatles replace Vaughan Williams.
At her typewriter, Rula Lenska's Helene abounds in joy and playful anger, enjoying the transatlantic conversation' with wide-ranging, good-humoured vocal expression. In contrast Gaunt's rich-voiced deliberation enthusiasm severely curtailed in his experienced evaluation of books by condition and edition only slowly reveals the warm regard beneath his reserved manner. Both act splendidly, with some good work among the bookstacks by Marks' other minions.
Helene Hanff: Rula Lenska
Frank Doel: William Gaunt
Cecily Farr: Helen Grace
Megan Wells/Maxine Stuart: Joanne Mitchell
Mr Martin: John Atterbury
William Humphries: Andrew Young
Thomas: Drew Rhys Williams
Joan Todd: Pippa Rathbone
Kate: Catherine McCulloch
Director: James Roose-Evans
Designer: Simon Higlett
Lighting: Jack Thompson
Sound: Ed Brimley
2004-04-11 13:31:07