Should it be last orders at the bar for this postwar Soho play?
Absolute Hell National Theatre
The bohemian waifs and strays who populate the Soho drinking den La Vie en Rose in 1945, in the play that Rodney Ackland first called The Pink Room, aren’t contentedly contemplating a better tomorrow. They’re liquor-steeped, reality-averse, little heartened by victory and the prospect of a Labour government, and also dread the loss of sexual freedom as old mores reassert themselves. A big flop in 1952, the play was dismissed as “a libel on the British people”, amid acid disapproval from critics.
Yet this teeming, Chekhovian-hogarthian portrait of tragicomic dissolution was rehabilitated by a 1991 BBC adaptation, starring Judi Dench as the blowsy proprietress Christine Foskett, and four years later by a full-blown production at the National, also with Dench. Now it’s back here again. Time to flagwave once more?
After three sometimes dragging hours, I emerged from Joe Hillgibbins’s production no less persuaded of Absolute Hell’s historic significance but more aware of its theatrical fragility and potential for self-indulgence. Crucially, what any production needs to communicate is how the play’s cast of characters huddle together for warmth.
Hill-gibbins musters, overtly, that huddling – there’s a lot of choreographed business as the regulars of this fast-fading establishment crowd the bar area, perform synchronised lean-ins to pick up on chit-chat and even, in the second half, do the conga. The warmth, though, goes Awol. There’s nothing rosy about Lizzie Clachan’s monumental, factory-dour, multi-level set. The furnishings (tasselled lampshades, snug chairs) do some of the atmospheric work, our imagination must fill in the rest. The action never feels hemmed in by louche London. Not only does a sense of claustrophobia escape, sometimes audibility does, too.
As the airs-and-graces queen of a crumbling empire, Kate Fleetwood doesn’t so much dominate proceedings as look dwarfed by them. As chiselled as a heyday Hepburn, she struggles to convince as the sort of rheumatic, desperate soul who’d throw herself into the arms of any younger stranger and lacks the cracked-voice pathos Dench brought to the part. A pity. Elsewhere, though, there’s ample enough to admire.
Oddly reminiscent of Bill Nighy in the role on TV, Charles Edwards shines as neurotic, impecunious writer Hugh, futilely railing at the stout lesbian critic (Jenny Galloway) who ruined his career and bereft at the loss of his partner Nigel to tactical heterosexuality. Patricia England makes her mark as the squiffy-dotty Julia (“If the Socialists get in … they’re going to nationalise women” is a typical throwaway gem), Jonathan Slinger is terrific as a snarling film director, and Sinead Matthews has just the right insecure poise as a dolled-up floozy who’s too feebly self-preoccupied to focus on the news brought to her from the “horror camps”.
Depending on your view, then, this is a glass half-empty or half-full revival but far from an absolute must.