![]() ![]() Clive Francis as Frank Doel – Photo by Richard Hubert Smith As you will know if you have seen the 1987 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft, Doel was seen by the author as an archetype of a certain Englishness bookishness, in which passion co-exists with pedantry and mystical levels of adoration for the beloved object, the book, are clothed in the garb of an accountant. She writes from her adoptive city of New York to Frank Doel, whose London antiquarian bookshop is located at the address of the show’s title. So here is what is termed by the literary types whose outpourings Hanff devoured an epistolary drama. Ironically so, since much of the dialogue, if it can be called that, comes in letter form. ![]() In this affectionate and bright-humoured production by Cambridge Arts Theatre, her talent and her lack of it are clearly on display. As she told The New York Times in 1982, “ I wrote great dialogue but I couldn’t invent a story to save my neck.” Both parts of this assessment bear the stamp of understatement, but also, and crucially, that of unsparing self-awareness. You can almost see the gathering furrows on the brows of stage producers, never mind movie ones, as the author pitches her plotline about, well, that’s it really: two book-lovers writing letters to each other.Ī much-rejected author of play scripts, Hanff was nothing if not a clear-eyed expert on her own shortcomings. ![]() Stefanie Powers – Photo by Richard Hubert SmithĪs unlikely stage hits go, few come unlikelier than Helene Hanff’s chronicle of a correspondence between two bibliophiles. ![]()
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