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Revival of a realist

Published Thursday 5 February 2004 at 13:30

After the poetic realism of his plays met with a mixed reception in the first half of the 20th century, Rodney Ackland spent years in obscurity until he was rediscovered by Sam Walters and the Orange Tree, writes Nick Smurthwaite

Twenty years before Look Back in Anger turned the theatre world upside down, a lone voice attempted to introduce a new form of poetic realism into what was then a terminally frivolous and rose-tinted West End.

Paying little heed to popular demand, Rodney Ackland wrote about a Bohemian subculture in which bills were unpaid, dreams unfulfilled and love unrequited. Inspired by Chekhov, Ackland gathered large numbers of characters together under some flimsy pretext and proceeded to strip them bare. They talked endlessly about happiness, seldom achieving it.

Detractors found his plays plotless, rambling and squalid. One reviewer described his first play, Improper People (1929) - written when he was 21- as “a farrago of amiable nonsense”.

But Ackland also had and still has his admirers. James Agate praised him consistently for his innovation, wit and refusal to sentimentalise emotions. Terence Rattigan was so disgusted when the producer Binkie Beaumont declined to put on The Pink Room (1951) on the grounds that it was “a libel on the British people”, that he financed its production himself at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Tyrone Guthrie, another staunch supporter, wrote at the time that “if people turn to The Pink Room (in years to come) for historical evidence, they will be rewarded by the discovery of a piece of exquisite and intricate theatrical craftsmanship”.

In his declining years, Ackland found another champion in Sam Walters, founder-director of the Orange Tree, who was surprised to discover in the early eighties that the playwright was living round the corner from his little pub theatre, as it then was.

“I had a visit from Rodney’s carer, a man called Terry, who wanted to know why we never did any of his plays,” recalls Sam Walters. “So I went to see him in his little Richmond flat and I took away a stack of his plays which hadn’t been produced for years.”

Walters was struck by the Chekhovian echoes in Ackland’s work and decided to produce The Dark River in 1984, followed four years later by The Pink Room, now renamed Absolute Hell. Ackland himself performed briefly in The Dark River towards the end of the run when the late Noel Howlett fell ill and later died.

The Orange Tree’s rediscovery of these two fine plays led to a reappraisal of Ackland and the National Theatre mounted its own revival of Absolute Hell, with Judi Dench playing the ageing femme fatale at the play’s heart, a production that was later televised.

Now the Orange Tree is to revive Ackland’s second play, Strange Orchestra. Written when he was 21, it marked his West End debut, when he was directed by John Gielgud in 1930.

When I interviewed Ackland in 1988, propped up in bed, curtains closed, with two cats for company, he recalled this early flowering: “I think I achieved some moments of poetry in Strange Orchestra. I set it in Chelsea because I thought audiences would accept behaviour in Chelsea they wouldn’t accept anywhere else. The leading lady had three children by different men, so it wasn’t what you would call a play for the establishment.”

Of the years of neglect and rejection, Ackland seemed amused rather than embittered. “At times I feel like a character out of Kafka who is being tried for a crime he hasn’t committed,” he said. “Neither the theatre nor television seems to want anything to do with me. I’ve no idea why this should be except perhaps that I’m not trendy, nor ever have been.”

At the time of his greatest output in the thirties - when he wrote 14 plays, all of which were produced, as well as many screenplays - audiences were accustomed to knowing what to expect. It wasn’t even sufficient to describe a play as a comedy - they had to know if it was a light comedy, romantic comedy, farce and so on. Ackland was contemptuous of any attempt to pigeonhole his work.

Like many playwrights, Ackland started out as an actor at 15, having answered an ad in The Stage for boys who could sing, dance and act. “I went on tour for six weeks with some terrible juvenile show but anything was better than going back to school,” he recalled. “The only real education I received was at the pictures. I used to sneak off when I should have been playing games.”

What sparked his enthusiasm for drama initially was an early encounter with Three Sisters at the long defunct Barnes Theatre - latterly the Olympic Studios - in south-west London. “I was bowled over. It was as different from anything I had seen as Debussy’s La Mer compared to a brass band playing Land of Hope and Glory. My whole life as a creative artist started at that moment.”

He was touchingly proud of his best work. “I adore seeing my own plays. I wrote myself some good acting parts when I first started to write plays but I soon realised that I much preferred sitting out front, watching it all come to life.”

Strange Orchestra is playing at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, from February 11 to March 20.

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