In 2018 the National staged another revival, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins and starring Kate Fleetwood.
(meta data) TITLE: Absolute Hell review – postwar Soho gets a Weimar makeover | Stage | The Guardian (meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/michaelbillington (meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian (meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2018-04-26T06:49:10-0400 Skip to main content The Guardian - Back to home Support The Guardian Available for everyone, funded by readers Search jobs Sign in current edition: US edition Art & design TV & radio # Absolute Hell review – postwar Soho gets a Weimar makeover 3 / 5 stars 3 out of 5 stars. Lyttelton, LondonJoe Hill-Gibbins gives Rodney Ackland's drama the full expressionist works in a production of visual bravura Michael Billington Thu 26 Apr 2018 06.49 EDT Last modified on Mon 3 Dec 2018 10.14 EST Raffish bohemia … Charles Edwards and Kate Fleetwood in Absolute Hell. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian At the curtain call for this revival of Rodney Ackland's 1952 play, a total of 28 actors line up across the Lyttelton stage. While the luxury of a big ensemble is welcome in this penny-pinching age, it's a reminder that the play, however intriguing as a social document, cannot quite sustain the symbolic weight that Ackland – and Joe Hill-Gibbins's production – place upon it. The piece has had a rum history. It bombed badly at its premiere, under the title The Pink Room, but a revised version enjoyed big success at the Orange Tree in 1988 and at the National in 1995, and it continues to fascinate. Ackland sets the action in a louche Soho drinking club in the summer months of 1945, between VE Day and Labour's landslide electoral victory. But the outside world barely impinges on these dedicated boozers, who maintain a glassy-eyed indifference even when shown photos of the concentration camps. Led by the club's gregariously lonely owner, Christine, they live for the moment. Their self-absorption is epitomised by Hugh Marriner, a once-promising novelist desperate to hang on to his male lover and clinch an unlikely movie contract. Like Patrick Hamilton in Hangover Square, Ackland describes with pinpoint accuracy a metropolitan sub-world: the camp movie director, the Austrian black marketeer and his faithless doxy, and the GI seeking to get laid all seem drawn from life. But Ackland also wants us to see the club, which falls apart as Labour triumphs, as a metaphor for a reality-evading England, and he even invokes Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in the final moments. The difference is that Chekhov's feckless dreamers not only represent their class but stand for something permanent in the human condition; Ackland's myopic drunkards simply embody the raffish bohemia of postwar Soho. In an attempt to boost the play's significance, Hill-Gibbins gives it the full expressionist works. Lizzie Clachan's set is a multi-level cavern whose thick gloom is offset by pink lampshades. Time and again I was reminded of Otto Dix's paintings evoking the hedonistic frenzy of the Weimar Republic. At one point the club's members do a snake-like conga through a smoke-filled room, at another they appear in grotesque animal masks, and, throughout, a pointed contrast is drawn between the cliquey drinkers and the clacking typewriters of the Labour offices nearby. But, while the staging is superbly orchestrated, it has an epic quality Ackland's play doesn't wholly justify. For all the visual bravura, individual performers stand out and none more so than Charles Edwards, who makes the failed novelist the centre of the production. Everything about him is right, from the ill-knotted tie to the rumpled cardigan, but Edwards also captures perfectly the desperate neediness of an overgrown mother's boy looking for emotional security. Kate Fleetwood lends the hostess the right air of public solitude and there is strong support from Jonathan Slinger as the brutal movie-maker, Danny Webb as the anxious Austrian and Sinéad Matthews as his partner, who professes leftwing leanings but is too befuddled to vote. I suspect the play has been revived now to warn us that we too are dodging the dangers of reality, but Ackland's play emerges more as an enjoyable slice of social history than as a timeless myth. At the Lyttelton, London, until 16 June. Box office: 020-7452 3000. National Theatre Reuse this content
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Rodney Ackland
Theatre career.
He joined Robert Newton as co-authors of "Cupid and Mars" (1945), and "A Multitude of Sins" (1951)
 The first staging of his large-cast drama, "The Pink Room" (or "The Escapists"), in Brighton and then at the Lyric Hammersmith in London on 18 June 1952, was largely financed by Terence Rattigan, who liked the play and believed it deserved a London production. "The Pink Room" was a tragi-comedy set in the summer of 1945 in a seedy London club (based on the French Club in Soho). It received a severe critical panning and after that, apart from one further play and an adaptation, it led to a 40-year near-silence from the playwright. According to its director, Frith Banbury, "When the play failed, Terry never wanted to see Rodney again." 
 However, following the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain's licensing and censorship functions in 1968, there was a growing permissiveness about what could be presented on the stage, and in the 1980s, while ailing with leukaemia, Ackland rewrote aspects of this play, re-titling it "Absolute Hell". It was put on in its new form in 1988 to considerable success at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond-upon-Thames, directed by Sam Walters and John Gardyne, and starring Polly Hemingway and David Rintoul. 
 In 1991 it was adapted and directed for BBC Television by Anthony Page, starring Dame Judi Dench, and the play was revived by Page at the Royal National Theatre in 1995, again with Dench in the leading role.