Comic drama that begs us all to love it
Ais a play that defies you to give it a bad review. That is not because Rodney Ackland’s 1936 work (now receiving its first London production in 80 years) is a sublime piece of drama, but rather because its hero, Clive Monkhams, is an earnest young playwright relying on a triumphant West End debut to save his genteel widowed mother and sisters from poverty.
When the turgid-sounding play gets a mauling, Clive (performed here by Adam Buchanan) picks up the telephone and vents his spleen on a cruel critic. Hilariously, it’s the wrong number. The coping classes in today’s Britain will find much to identify with in the Monkhams’ family, living in reduced circumstances in a Hampstead basement flat. Luckily, they are a sparky lot, and the cast utter Ackland’s ripe dialogue with relish. The humour pierces through the essential sadness and laughs come in the form of downtrodden char Mrs Batley (Josie Kidd), loyal to the last but keen to make her odd comments about modern theatre heard. For example, she suggests that the high-minded Clive should venture into adult drama, used as a preventative during the First World War “to stop our Tommies getting the clap”.
Several of the performances are very good, but two are particularly effective: Beverley Klein as Marigold Ivens, an eccentric, aspiring actress, no longer young, and Jasmine Blackborow as Frances the lodger, fending off the affections of a colonial middle-aged bore while trying to make herself love the infatuated Clive.
Sometimes a tendency recurs to play the lines with the crisp campness of a Noël Coward, but Klein and Blackborow raise their game – Klein offering something brilliantly bonkers and Blackborow giving an acutely sensitive portrayal of someone suffering from a past (unspecified) emotional trauma.
In truth, After October is a young man’s play (Ackland was 28 when he wrote it) and it is, in places, immature. There is too much reliance on telephone calls or ringing doorbells at dramatically resonant moments, and Ackland’s desire to emulate Chekhov can grow wearisome. Like
The Seagull’s Arkadina, Mrs Monkham is a faded actress; but she is far less of a grande dame, a brittle but not-quitebroken woman (here played with a nervous energy by Sasha Waddell), trying to relive past glories through her daughters.
This is a play with heart and, ultimately, the Monkhams and their various hangers-on stay with you. Clive may be a bad playwright, but Ackland matured into a great one, and you can see the promise that would later flourish in works such as Before
the Party and Absolute Hell. There are a few longueurs in Oscar Toeman’s production (it could have been trimmed by 20 minutes), and the 11-strong cast are occasionally hobbled by the snug Finborough space. But there is a comic exuberance and a conviction that make this an enjoyable and often profoundly moving evening – proof that this small, impoverished theatre can punch well above its weight.
‘This is a young man’s play; Clive may be a bad playwright but Ackland matured into a great one’