Entertaining, but not their best

84, Charing Cross Road, a play about an antiquarian bookshop, is a fitting finale for the Andrews Lane Theatre.

The walls of the Andrews Lane theatre are cluttered with black and white stage photographs and mounted playbills. There are two of the most successful shows in recent Irish theatre, Alone It Stands and Stones in his Pockets; other notable Irish plays such as Donal O'Kelly's Catalpa and Jimmy Murphy's Kings of the Kilburn High Road; and a slew of premieres presented by Red Kettle, Barabbas, Pigsback (now Fishamble) and Passion Machine. This has been a significant theatre. But perhaps more significant in recent years has been the role played by the tiny upstairs studio: there are fewer and fewer spaces in town where young companies can afford to cut their teeth, where they can stage their profit-share productions with the vestige of professionalism that performing in a city-centre theatre brings. The City Arts Centre, the Crypt and the Mint now seem long gone; the International has been annexed by the comics. Andrews Lane will be missed.

84, Charing Cross Road is both a fitting and an inauspicious finale for the theatre. It is a play about the love of books, a homage to an antiquarian bookshop. It is easy to see the Lane management approaching it as a metaphorical homage to their theatre. It is a sentimental play for a sentimental moment.

The play is nothing more than a series of letters between an American writer and a staff member of the eponymous London bookshop, which starts in the late 1940s. She (the writer): brash, witty, erudite, alone. He (the bookseller): reserved, diligent, responsible, but embattled. Their relationship evolves between the lines of their letters; she seduces him with brazen requests for literary favours. He laboriously removes the vestiges of formality from his signature as if they were nervously discarded outer garments (“FPD, on behalf of Marx & Co” becomes, eventually, “Frank”). Was there ever a better chat-up line than this? “I require a book of love poems, just a nice book, preferably small enough to stash in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park.”

The play is marked by the radiant integrity of the author's relationship with literature, and by the pathos marked by the loneliness implicit in her relationship with books and with the London bookshop. It is driven by the tension between our knowledge that she must visit the bookshop and the inevitability that either she never will or, when she does, something will go horribly wrong. Such are the fates.

Yet for all the elegance and economy of this conceit, it remains just a series of letters, and a series of letters is a difficult thing to stage. It is a mark of the success of this production that the pace and energy flag only occasionally. Though Karen Ardiff and Simon Coury, as the writer and bookseller, never actually talk to each other on stage, the energy between them sparks. Around them, director Terry Byrne marshals a disciplined ensemble that effectively recreates the business and bustle of the bookshop.

There are two key moments when it falters: one, where Ardiff sinks into a melancholy that ends, unconvincingly, in tears; “you're the only soul alive who understands me”, she says to her bookseller, to a gratuitous soundtrack of the Beatles' Yesterday. The staging suggests of a lack of confidence in the understatement of the script. The other is a final scene that doesn't ring true (even though it may, paradoxically, be true) and smacks of a producer's demand that the story be neatly sewn up.

So Andrews Lane bows out with an entertaining but indulgent piece of romanticism. It has had more auspicious moments as a theatre; but they're entitled to orchestrate their own curtain call, and this one seems gently fitting.