“Vivien fucking Leigh,” fumes Millie Grable as she marches into her Hollywood Boulevard office to escape that actor’s induction into the Walk of Fame across the road.
She has reason to be angry. As a powerful agent to the stars – the gallery of headshots that line her office pays testimony to their A-list calibre – what she really wanted to do with her life was to be an actor. She got near the dream too, excelling at Rada alongside Leigh, although she tells us ruefully that “I was the pretty one, the talented one.”
This is a monologue of regret and missed chances, which is a juicy enough conceit, but here consists of little other than exposition and backstory. Millie sets up a camera at the beginning, as if filming her own screen test, but this feels like a flimsy basis for a static drama that tells rather than shows.
Debbie Chazen is full of conviction in her part as Millie but her efforts are wasted on a play, written and directed by Keith Merrill, that sounds so generic that we simply do not feel her tragedy. It is broad-brush in its characterisation and its portrayal of resentment, relying on repeated ideas and hackneyed lines. She tells us of the time she tried to sleep with Rock Hudson (“before I knew”) and the time she almost got the part of Scarlett O’Hara (“Frankly my dear I did not give a damn”).
She either chain smokes or knocks back the cocktails as she talks. Occasionally she disappears behind the curtains in her office to spit rage at Leigh’s ceremony, or grabs her phone for brief calls to her assistant.
Potentially interesting questions emerge from her hour-long diatribe: it is clear she is a success who feels a failure, a woman in a man’s world who believes she has been denied her “real” vocation and whose talents have been ignored in lieu of less able actors. She makes a distinction between what she sees as the artistry of stage acting and its lesser form on screen. These are issues that might have formed the basis of a more satisfying play than the sketchy one here.
• At Seven Dials Playhouse, London, until 28 January
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