Time has lent a patina of pathos to this play by Rodney Ackland (1908-91). He enjoyed belated recognition after a jagged theatrical career and in this early piece, written in 1936, he honestly records the struggles of a young dramatist pinning all his hopes on West End success. It is Ackland’s most autobiographical work.
Ackland offers an unsparing self-portrait in the figure of Clive Monkhams: a harassed playwright who naively believes that his new anti-war play will rescue his family and friends from poverty. One believes in Monkhams, especially when he makes an abusive early-morning phone call to a hostile critic, but the play comes most alive in its portrait of the surrounding characters.
The most vivid is a parasitic poet, convinced of his own genius, who dismisses Monkham’s play while tapping him for money, but there is also vivacity in Monhkam’s stagey mum wistfully recalling her own past success in The Belle of New York. Chekhov was palpably Ackland’s inspiration and, although his play lacks the momentum of the Russian master, it painfully records the reckless optimism that accompanies any theatrical venture.
Oscar Toeman’s production skilfully disguises the play’s predictability by endowing each of its 11 characters with a bubbling inner life. Adam Buchanan captures exactly the bruised sensibility of the writer-hero, but there is strong support from Sasha Waddell as his adoring mother, Patrick Osborne as the scrounging poet and Beverley Klein as an eccentric, would-be thesp who was a big hit with Buxton amateurs. The play may not have the social resonance of Ackland’s Absolute Hell but it shows that being a young playwright isn’t exactly heaven.
- At the Finborough theatre, London, until 22 December. Box office: 0844 847 1652.
