84 Charing Cross Road: A Charming Production For All Who Love Books

84 Charing Cross Road is a play for all who love books and are interested in the interplay between American and British literary sensibilities.

Written as a book by Helene Hanff and adapted for the stage by James Roose-Evans, the play presents a series of letters written by a struggling script reader and writer, played with great New York Jewish brashness by Blazey Best as Helene Hanff, and the unassuming London antiquarian bookseller Frank Doel, played by Erik Thomson.

Helene writes to the bookseller in search of obscure English writers such as William Hazlitt, the diaries of Samuel Pepys, and Elizabethan love poetry, which gives the bookseller great pleasure to find for her.

Their correspondence over 20 years gradually warms with the anticipation that Helene may visit the bookshop in the near future, but her financial pressures are such that she never makes it before Frank Doel dies.

Other employees in the shop, played by Katie Fitchett, Angela Mahlatjie and Brian Meegan, add colour, warmth and humour to the production.

Nick Fry’s clever set places Helene’s desk in a cosy setting of wall-lined books against the back wall, while Doel’s desk and chair are centre stage.

Mark Kilmurray’s direction keeps the interchange between the two engaging main characters moving at a clip, so that two decades pass as swiftly as a dream.

The final reveal compensates for the sad news of Doel’s death.

The Ensemble is to be congratulated for mounting another terrific production. It made me want to go to a bookseller to pick up a copy of Helene Hanff’s memorial volume of a singular relationship between two individuals at the opposite ends of the earth.

84 Charing Cross Road is on at the Ensemble Theatre until 13 June.