Absolute Hell
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About this ebook
Set in a Soho drinking Club just after World War II, this savage, witty slice of Bohemian life in London was reviled by one critic as ‘an insult to the British people’. Its title then was The Pink Room, as close as the law would allow for a play in which one of its central characters is a drunken homosexual writer. Despite these obstacles, Absolute Hell is now regarded as a twentieth-century classic, following a sumptuous revival at the National Theatre, starring Dame Judi Dench. Earlier the play had been televised by Channel 4 after being rediscovered by the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, near to where the author Rodney Ackland was living in virtual obscurity. The play is remarkable for two reasons: It offers a realistic view of postwar London, in contrast to the nostalgic memories of the blitz and buzz bombs; Ackland’s craft is consummate, weaving together the lives of 20 speaking characters, many of them lost souls as they drift in and out of the bar in search of a more meaningful life. Ackland died in poverty, having written some of the finest plays of our time.
Rodney Ackland
Rodney Ackland’s first play Improper People was produced at the Arts Theatre Club, London in 1929. But it was not until 1932 that Ackland’s work finally reached the West End, when his fourth play Strange Orchestra transferred from the Embassy, Swiss Cottage to the St. Martin’s, St. Martin’s Lane, which caused James Agate in The Sunday Times to suggest that the ordinary stuff of the West End Theatre bore as much resemblance to Strange Orchestra ‘as unbleached calico to tattered silk’. The Dark River, produced at the Whitehall Theatre, and revived at the Orange Tree in 1985, was acclaimed by Hilary Spurling in The Spectator as ‘perhaps the one indisputably great play of the past half-century in English.
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