Whisky business in seedy Soho
And after a night with some rickety rogues, you’ll need a stiff drink
RODNEY ACKLAND’S Absolute Hell depicts drunkenness and homosexuality in a private club in London’s Soho at the end of World War II.
The play first saw life in 1952, when theatre censorship existed. It was called The Pink Room back then and it flopped, possibly because early Fifties Britain was not yet ready to swallow such a negative image of itself.
In later years, Ackland made his unwieldy play more forthright and gave it the new, not necessarily better, name. Some consider it a masterpiece. They are overstating the case.
Yet this three-hour evening does have its moments, if only as a reminder of grimmer days.
The club is presided over by Christine, one of those formidable chatelaines who were still dominant in Soho dives until about quarter of a century ago. Christine’s members are bohemians, depressives, failures. They include a tyrannical arts critic. Perish the thought.
These people are almost as decrepit as the club’s building, which is falling to pieces. With the roof masonry occasionally cascading to the floor, up goes a shout for more whiskies.
One actress ( playing a prostitute) walks around the perimeter of the set without saying a word. The mood is slightly mad and distracted.
The play has an impractically big cast. Indeed, there are so many members of this drinking den, how can it possibly be financially imperilled? Yet the very air seems to reek of decay, particularly with Christine’s most regular customer Hugh Marriner, an impoverished novelist.
Sports-jacketed, threadbare Hugh is played by Charles Edwards, perhaps our most likeable stage actor. No show with Mr Edwards is worth missing; but in this production he is a rare beacon of acting excellence.
The only performers who come close to him are Kate Fleetwood, playing Christine, and Jonathan Slinger as a seedy film director.
The story charts the collapse of Hugh’s love-life as his boyfriend Nigel (Prasanna Puwanarajah) leaves him for a woman.
Most of the club characters have problems with money, addiction or romance. They drink with deranged thirsts — people trying to avoid reality and to forget the horrors of war.
What are we to make of it today, all this manic boozing, this self- destruction of our parents and grandparents’ generation?
That is where the play, despite its clunky moments, has a modern purchase. It may leave us more dolefully aware of just how low things must have been behind the patriotic facade of VE Day and all that.
There is a reference — said to
be the first in British theatre — to Hitler’s death camps. Mr Slinger’s character tries to make a weak joke about the word ‘camp’.
He is heard in awkward silence by his friends. They were still discovering how awful things had been in Germany.
That mention of the death camps clashes powerfully with this artsy clique’s attempt to drown its sorrows. I expected Miss Fleetwood’s Christine to be the main figure, but the set design makes the bar invisible and her prominence thus ebbs. Instead, it is Mr Edwards’s Hugh who absorbs us. A multi-levelled set is over- elaborate and distracting. distracting The lighting is dark. Maybe the gloom suits the story’s unhappy arc. It would be another decade until the national mood lifted.
TO THE Almeida Theatre in North London’s Islington to watch an expletive-spattered play which bewails the pressure on theatres to produce accessible work. That is but one of the complaints against rotten, rotten life made in Ella Hickson’s The Writer.
The central character is a young playwright who regards the world as a male conspiracy. She dumps her boyfriend and dives into the sea with a lesbian goddess from Greek mythology.
Later, she moves to a Docklands flat with a human embodiment of that goddess and works off her frustrations by nipping behind a designer sofa and using a symbol of male oppression, a doubleended sex toy. Pass the Revels, Mabel. Romola Garai plays the title role. Her character slaps down a £40,000 script-writing commission, saying she does not need the money. We never do learn how she supports herself. Private income, maybe.
Lara Rossi shines as the playwright’s girlfriend but Samuel West is less persuasive as the writer’s bloke. Too brahmin a figure to play an ordinary Joe, Mr West is better when playing a conceited, hypocritical theatrical in the show’s opening scene. Much more up spoilt Sam’s street!
As I sat through its 120 minutes without interval — which at least stops punters legging it for the exits — I recalled Labour MP John Mann’s recent comment that, in every year for the past decade, Islington has received more Arts Council funding than all the Midlands and Northern English excoalfield communities combined.
Such places would welcome any arts funding. They might use it more constructively than this dismal, egocentric, elitist effort.
Yet part of me welcomed The Writer because it illustrates an argument I have long put: parts of our state-subsidised theatre have disappeared up their own fundaments and seem actively to sneer at the taxpayers who fund them.