Irrelevant. Seven Dials Playhouse.

Debbie Chazen is utterly scintillating as a bitter pill-popping alcoholic casting agent in Keith Merrill’s tribute to Hollywood and Hedda Gabler.

Millie Grable, the fictional protagonist of Merrill’s wonderfully atmospheric Irrelevant, is London theatreland’s most promising pre-war actor. Her Hedda Gabler is the talk of the year, and she still has the working revolvers from that production in her LA office desk.

Following a move to Hollywood, Millie is all set to take the leading role in Gone With The Wind. That is, until her nemesis and fellow RADA alumni Vivian Leigh steals the part and the limelight. Left pregnant after a wild and short romance with Clark Gable, a botched abortion leaves her in contestant pain. The promise of a glittering movie career comes to nothing. Beaten down by constant rejection and dumped by her studio, she attempts a reboot on Broadway. That too comes to nothing. Her final acting part is a short-lived Shakespeare production in Birmingham, Alabama.

Caustic, angry, and bitter that a life so full of promise has come to nothing, Grable (the anagram for Ibsen’s Gabler is deliberate) sees an opportunity for reinvention as a Hollywood casting agent. She is quite some success, getting Sidney Poitier his big break and Sean Connery the role as James Bond. But now her business partner is branching out on his own and taking her big name clients with him, unsurprising perhaps given the number of vodka Martinis and pills she consumes.

There is an homage to Hedda in Millie. Her life, like Gabler’s, is one of promises unfulfilled. In the end of Ibsen’s play Gabler makes a choice that is tragic but also heroic. When the people Millie has worked so hard for start to abandon ship, she too faces a similar choice. Chazen, surely one of London’s most hard- working theatre actors, gives a tremendously well-observed performance as the hard-drinking, straight-talking agent, whose disappointment with life is etched in her face like a stone carving. As she tells her tale, monologue style, she breaks off to shower abuse from her office window on the Hollywood stars below. Hers is the failed life of an onlooker not a participant, and she knows it. There is bittersweet comedy here, but there is most definitely tragedy too.

Despite some irritating anachronisms (surely there was no Prozac in the swinging sixties) the disreputable atmosphere of Hollywood casting agents, well before ‘me too’ was ever even thought about, comes across perfectly in Merrill’s taut and clever writing. Highly recommended.

Writer / Director Keith Merrill