Rodney Ackland ARTS

HILARY SPURLING

`It's only the hairs on a gooseberry That stop it from being a grape,' as the pantomime dame said in Rodney Ack- land's Strange Orchestra. This time last year, I seem to remember, we saw Cicely Court- neidge and Jack Hulbert on the West End stage in Dear Octopus. We were clearly entering a revivalist period and, in a week which brings Miss Courtneidge and Mr Hulbert back again in Dear Charles, I wonder now, as wondered then, why it has occurred to nobody to revive Rodney Ackland. We have not, after all, so many playwrights in our whole history, let alone our immediate past, that we can afford to neglect one of such singular subtlety and power.

It still seems extraordinary that a period which produced the shameless sentimentality of Dear Octopus (1938) also produced, on an almost identical theme. Mr Ackland's strange and sombre play, Birthday (1934). Such fastidious emotional honesty must have seemed, like the hairs on the gooseberry. peculiarly mortifying in an age of soft centres. Already with Strange Orchestra (directed by John Gielgud in 1932, when Mr Ackland was twenty- four), there were suspicions that something was up. 'Enthusiastic notices in the papers next morning cost the playwright his job with British International Pictures—his superiors, far from being impressed, promptly sacked him on the grounds that, if RIP were harbouring a secret highbrow on the premises, the quicker he were escorted off the better.

And yet in a sense, if Mr Ackland had not existed. one would almost have had to invent him_ For even the most cursory reading of the drama of the period confirms the charges— of hypocrisy, smugness, a crippling dis- ingenuousness—regularly levelled against it; except that, from time to time and in startling contrast to the general unction, one finds a spurt of such genuine venom (most notably in those scenes of poisonous feminine malice at which.English actresses excel, and which, from Our Betters to Fallen Angels, from Dear Octopus even down to Jet's All Go Down the Strand last year, form a staple ingredient of the genre) that the hair curls on one's head. It must have occurred to any observer that the fears and inhibitions underlying such massive complacency should yield a subject intrinsically dramatic—and one especially suited to a nation whose playwrights have traditionally thriven on the follies and pretensions of its middle-classes. So that it is perhaps not so odd to find that Mr Ackland was there, probing, in play after play, precisely this sensitive area; if Birthday is a rich, complex and profoundly searching portrait of the ugliest aspects of contemporary middle-class society, then The Dark River— begun in 1937 and finished in 1942—has crystal- lised, as few works have done in any field and certainly no play, the apprehensions, the dismal and treacherous vacillations of that uneasy period.

Not that Mr Ackland's early plays seem pre- dominantly either melancholy or harsh—on the contrary. They are set on social fringes, in

theatrical digs or shabby flats in Hampstead, Kilburn, Chelsea, among characters chronically hard up, out of work, subsisting with a forlorn gallantry or, more often, a disdainful and rackety gaiety. There is something immensely engaging about the courage and conceit of these strangely affronted beings—for the most part failed or aspiring novelists, painters, poets, actresses (They're only beginning to be as good as I was in the Buxton Dramatic'), all nourished on the passionate conviction that a mistake has been made. that somehow their native talent must be recognised and rescued from the sordid surroundings which, by an oversight, have been temporarily foisted upon them. Even in the earliest plays— Improper People (029) and Dance With No Music (19301—where mis- fortunes are laid on with a fairly rash and reckless hand, there are bursts of this charac- teristic exuberance. No wonder if Mrs Patrick Campbell. arriving to stage a comeback as the thrilling but decidedly skittish Vera in Strange Orchestra, opted on reflection to return to the South of France: 'She's not quite a lady, is she? I'm afraid you'll have to get poor dear Maude [Lady Tree) to play her.'

Best of all, in a long line of these raffish and faintly disreputable ladies, is Mrs Monkhams in After October (1936); here again scenes of agitation or despondency alternate with en- trancing visions of the past or the future, and a withering scorn for the present. Mrs Monk- hams dreams of the Gaiety in the 'nineties— of Tootie Smart and Birdie Featherstone, Flo Delabare, Flossie Arkwright and the day Fancy Dawlish fell ill ('Naturally, it was the biggest chance of my life. Well, I didn't know it, but that damned Fancy dragged herself out of bed to watch me rehearse . . .'). Her son, Clive, lives on his expectations—'How tasteful your choice of books! Galsworthy. Hugh Wal- pole ... six copies of a book .by Clive Monk- hams. With Dickens on one side and Tolstoy on the other,' as his friend Oliver nastily puts it. This odious poet is one of Mr Ackland's most charming creations; his very first words (`You wish I hadn't come.' I don't.' If I never communicated with you again, you'd feel relief rather than sorrow') evince a talent for causing discomfort amply born out by his later, specta- cular displays of malice. And yet, for all his insane vanity and rancour, Oliver is wretchedly vulnerable and manages even, in moments of crisis, what might pass on his own sour and clumsy terms for a kind of comfort. For, if the pangs of dejection are as sharp in this play as elsewhere, it has also an ebullience and, in Clive and his mother, a sober, unresentful self-

knowledge which few, if any, of Mr Ackland's characters were allowed to experience again.

Or, for that matter, before. Deceit and dis- honesty are the chief themes of Birthday and here, for the first time, these sleazy, shiftless Bohemians are seen from outside, through the eyes of a sturdy middle-class household. Al- ready in its first few minutes, the play has a sinister flavour: in a drawing room dominated by a large and hideous vase, half lit by street- lamps and a bar of light falling from the window opposite, one can hear the sounds of a party across the street—loud voices, a gramo- phone, a burst of laughter eerily echoing the laughter on stage. There is an atmosphere of testiness and after dinner lethargy. This family intimacy is as stale and cloying as an animal smell; and there is that curious fascination, mixed with disapproval and an almost hysterical revulsion, which draws them so often to the window. An unknown young man appears in the doorway, crosses the room, lifts the vase and smashes it to pieces.

This vase becomes a focus for the family's resentment towards the intruders and, when the elder daughter, Rosamund. makes her hope- less attempt to escape, for something very like terror: Mark, for whom it had existed only as a monstrosity and the object of a drunken dare. learns to see it as precious to its owners; and Rosamund, beginning to look at her family through his eyes, comes to see it as ugly. But the vase is only one thread in the shifting patterns of the play, as the two sides engage in a perpetual reversal of roles: in the appal- ling tea oarty of Act 2 (1 hope you don't mind my saving so, but I am so excited about your room. You've furnished it so wittily'), the hosts have a certain dignity faced With the glib vulgarity of Mark's perfectly frightful friends. But. in the family row which follows, one has a glimpse of such squalid depths, such rank, ingrained selfishness, a sensation- of such violence that one can only peer and draw back. The scene has a grotesque ferocity at which even Wycherley might have quailed.

It is only in the cold aftermath. in their veiled bullying and their jealous. sleepy vindictiveness towards Rosamund, that one recognises the family's formidable strength. For these people are adepts at emotional cruelty, at a kind of surreptitious, half-conscious blackmail based on self-pity and a punishing spite. Stubborn, humourless, grasping, they are astute only at searching out where each. other may best be wounded, and in the vicious tenacity with which, once pried out, they winkle away at each other's weak spots.

We never again find anything approaching quite this pitch of savage, choking intensity. In The Dark River the canvas has, if not lightened, at any rate moved on to a looser and in some ways a grander scale. The play is set in a house belonging to a retired school- mistress on a backwater of the Thames: 'Have you noticed that the water's stagnant under the window at the back?' Sheer imagination. We took this house in the first place because of that beautiful clear water."But, Merry, that was—' 'Blooming nonsense. I've never smelt anything.'

The year is 1937; there are 'Arms for Spain' meetings on the bank, fascists with truncheons, an earnest young man canvassing deep air-raid shelters, guns booming from an RAF hangar nearby, and through it all Mrs Merriman's brisk, dismissive refrain: 'What we do is take no notice and we don't hear anything.' The play is like a standing pool, barely disturbed by these ripples from the outside world. There is Edmund L. Reade, once a great name in motion pictures, whose film Humanity (`That was a great picture . . . It was a cry from my heart against the futility of war ... That was in 1919') makes a disastrous and derisive come- back; there is an abortive love affair, various spongers and hangers-on, an invalid father approaching senility, a powerful sense of in- dividual pain and loss; and there is the child Mervyn—a marvellously assured and aggravat- ing small boy—who spells out `Guernica' from the papers and is shouted down by his pre- occupied elders. So that, as the play gathers momentum, this indifference to any larger con- cern is counterpointed by a sense of the bleak backdrop against which the characters advance and retreat, as in a dance, absorbed in their own individual hurts.

For The Dark River, of all Mr Ackland's plays, is the most overtly Chekhovian; here the nostalgia which runs through them all is dis- tilled into a haunting melancholy : 'CATHERINE Do you remember those modern ballets? "The House Party." "The Blue Train."

GWEN "The Cat." Of course, I adored "Wake Up and Dream."

CATHERINE Do you remember "Rockets"? I was only a child then.

GWEN Lorna and Toots, they were divine. (Then, with quick defensiveness.) So was I. CATHERINE And Florence Mills. She's dead now. GWEN So's Norah Bayes. What heaven those

days were, though. "The Forty-Three and the Bullfrogs." Nobody's gay now but me.'

But, just as the peculiarly English venom of Birthday is fiercer than anything in Chekhov, unless perhaps lvanov, so, in The Dark River, the play's debt to Chekhov serves to heighten by contrast this extraordinary evocation of England at a particular time and place. Perhaps in the end, the two plays will live most strongly for these distillations, each of a separate mood : the stifling bitterness of the last scene in Birth- day when Rosamund is returned to her family, like the vase, broken and stuck together; and the sense of dissolution, of weakness and failure meandering through that series of inconclusive departures in the last act of The Dark River. And yet, the final impression is not so much of desolation, as of a supple strength and beauty in the elusive rhythms of the whole, the play of light and colour in fragments of song, snatches of dialogue, the scratch of a gramo- phone needle, above all of a steadfast emotional generosity which few playwrights have achieved in any age or country.

There is no space here to deal with the later plays or with some dozen adaptations, of which only three (two adaptations and what Clive Monkhams's friend once called 'a detective thing') are available in print. What we need now is an edition at least of the three finest plays, and preferably of four or five more; but, above all, to see The Dark River at the National Theatre where the company would do justice to what is, after all, perhaps the one indisput- ably great play of the past half century in English; After October installed at some small, choice theatre, best of all at the Hampstead Club to which its setting is so eminently appropriate; and Birthday in the commercial West End where, as a display of that glittering malice, that spectacular and devious subtlety !Web is the strength par excellence of tradi- tional English acting, it would be- box-office gold.