Pep and pace give this epistolary warhorse a new lease on life at the Ensemble. What promises to be a gently charming evening of epistolary lawn tennis instead plays out like high-stakes ping pong.

Adapted by James Roose-Evans from New York writer Helene Hanff’s slender 1970 memoir, 84 Charing Cross Road charts a transatlantic love affair of sorts between Hanff, then a struggling writer, and Frank Doel, manager of an antiquarian bookshop in London.

Erik Thomson and Blazey Best in 84 Charing Cross Road. Photo © Prudence Upton

Beginning in 1949, the relationship blooms through a flow of airmailed letters and orders for books by largely forgotten authors. Hanff (played here by Blazey Best) is mad for William Hazlitt, John Henry Newman, the diaries of Samuel Pepys and obscure Elizabethan love poetry – which Doel (Erik Thomson), a bibliophile with the sharp eye of a practised dealer, is only too delighted to supply at prices Hanff can’t resist.

As the years pass, however, their correspondence grows warmer and the relationship takes on deeper colours; we sense a mutual curiosity and admiration building. They yearn to meet. But in these times and circumstances,...