Monday, May 24, 2021

June: No Meeting. 7 July: 84, Charing Cross Road

 

Because I am off on my travels, we are not going to be meeting in June.  But I'm making up for this with an absolutely wonderful play in July!


84 Charing Cross Road

by Helene Hanff


This play based on the hugely popular 1970 book, which was later made into a stage play, television play, and film, about the real-life twenty-year correspondence between the author and Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co antiquarian booksellers. 


Helene Hanff


Helene Hanff's career saw her move from unproduced playwright to writer of some of the earliest television dramas to becoming a noted writer and personality in her own right.  Originally a playright, when network television production geared up in the early 1950s, Hanff found a new career writing and editing scripts for many early television dramas. Chief among these was the series The Adventures of Ellery Queen. The bulk of television production eventually moved to California, but Hanff chose to remain in New York. As her TV work dried up, she turned to writing for magazines and, eventually, to the books that made her reputation. In 1981, Hanff also appeared as a would-be islander in the BBC's Desert Island Disks radio programme, in which she discussed many aspects of her career along with her required choice of disks.


84, Charing Cross Road  was first published in 1970. She depended on the bookshop—and on Doel—for the obscure classics and British literature titles that fueled her passion for self-education. She became intimately involved in the lives of the shop's staff, sending them food parcels during Britain's postwar shortages and sharing with them details of her life in Manhattan.

Due to financial difficulties and an aversion to travel, she put off visiting her English friends until too late.  Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still-standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. This trip was a highlight of her life.

In the 1987 film adaptation 84 Charing Cross Road, Hanff was played by Anne Bancroft, while Anthony Hopkins took the part of Frank Doel. Anne Jackson had earlier played Hanff and Frank Finlay had played Doel in a 1975 adaptation of the book for British television. 


I am delighted that we will be reading this play and hope you will enjoy it as much as me!






No comments:

Post a Comment