REVIEW: WHAT FRESH HELL IS IT? By Glenn T. Griffin at The Libra Theatre Café, Camden Town, 4-20 April 2025
If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to. – Dorothy Parker ★★★★
There’s a little gem of a show at a little gem of a new theatre in Camden. If more people knew about it, you would be hard pressed to buy a seat, but they don’t.
You may never have heard of the Libra Theatre Café – it’s been open less than a year – but it turns the pub theatre concept on its head: the theatre owns the café, rather than the other way round, and the café is there to serve the theatre. When you go into the café on the ground floor, the two young women who pour your drinks are the two actors who founded and run the theatre, Jessica Cole and Simina Ellis. The theatre is in the basement, and underground trains are clearly audible, rumbling past every few minutes. With this production at least, their main effect was to add to the atmosphere.
The one woman play is about Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), writer, wit and socialite in inter-war New York. This makes the task of writer and director Glenn T. Griffin easier than that of most playwrights, because the laugh out loud lines are all written for him. Dorothy Parker was wonderfully witty and clever, and the dilemma for Griffin must have been what to leave out.
There are some Parker lines and short poems you cannot leave out, because Parker afficionados will be waiting for them. He would not be forgiven for failing to include “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” – though unless I blinked, he did fail to include “Time may be a great healer but it’s a lousy beautician.” He did however get in my favourite among her short verses:
“By the time you swear you're his,
“Shivering and sighing.
“And he vows his passion is,
“Infinite, undying
“Lady make note of this --
“One of you is lying.”
He also had the good sense to know that when Parker fell in love, he did not need to write the scene where she is waiting and hoping for a phone call – Parker had written it as a short story, and all he needed to do was adapt it for the stage.
What he does have to do is to tell us about the complex and often despairingly unhappy woman who wrote these lines; chronicle her abortion, her suicide attempts, her descent into alcoholism, her sexual relationships with a series of unsuitable men. It helps that Carol Parradine, who plays Parker brilliantly, gets just the right balance between brittleness and vulnerability.
The small auditorium is laid out with tables, cabaret-style, which seems right for a show about a New York socialite. Endless trouble has been taken over the staging, with curtains, decanters of whisky, chairs and even a book evoking the period, and you walk in to the sort of music Parker would have heard every day of her life.
The show isn’t faultless, of course – nothing is. For one thing, it throws away some of Parker’s best lines in a recording before Parradine enters. But it’s a fitting tribute to one of the most interesting people of the twentieth century.
What Fresh Hell is It?
at The Libra Theatre CAFÉ, Camden, London
4 – 20 April 2025
BOX OFFICE
Written and Directed by Glenn T. Griffin
Starring Carol Parradine
Adapted from the works, wit and wisdom of Dorothy Parker
Reviewed by Francis Beckett
