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Rodney Ackland
(18 May 1908 - 6 December 1991)
Dan Rebellato
Royal Holloway, University of London
PRODUCTIONS:
Improper People, London, Arts Theatre, 9 October 1929.
Marion-Ella, London, Players Theatre, 30 June 1930.
Dance With No Music, London, Arts Theatre, 23 July 1930; London, Embassy Theatre, 27
June 1932.
Strange Orchestra, London, Embassy Theatre, 30 June 1931; London, St Martin’s Theatre, 27
September 1932; New York, Playhouse Theatre, 28 November 1933.
Ballerina [musical], freely adapted from novel by Eleanor Smith, Lyrics by Desmond Carter,
Music by Henry Sullivan, London, Gaiety Theatre, 10 October 1933.
Birthday, London, Cambridge Theatre, 2 February 1934. [Later rewritten and retitled Plot
Twenty-One, and even later as Smithereens, 1985, see below]
The White Guard, adaptation of play by Bulgakov, London, Ambassadors Theatre, 11 March
1934; London, Phoenix Theatre, 6 October 1938.
The Old Ladies, adaptation of novel by Hugh Walpole, London, New Theatre, 3 April 1935
(27 May 1935, transferred to St. Martin’s Theatre, London); [retitled Night in the House ]
New York, Booth Theatre, 7 November 1935; [with original title] London, Gateway
Theatre, 28 November 1944; London, Lyric Hammersmith, 4 October 1950; London,
Embassy Theatre, 18 August 1953.
After October, London, Arts Theatre, 21 February 1936; London, Criterion Theatre, 16 April
1936 (29 June 1936, transferred to Aldwych Theatre, London); revised, Chichester,
Minerva Studio Theatre, May 1997 (10 June 1997, transferred to Greenwich Theatre,
London);
Plot Twenty-One, London, Embassy Theatre, 19 October 1936.
Yes, My Darling Daughter, adaptation of play by Mark Reed, London, St James’s Theatre, 3
June 1937.
Remembrance of Things Past, London International Theatre Club at the Globe Theatre, 30
October 1938, 2 performances; revised as Dark River London, Whitehall Theatre, 19
October 1943.
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Sixth Floor, adapted from play by Alfred Gheri, London, St James’s Theatre, 22 May 1939.
Blossom Time [musical], Music by Franz Schubert, Lyrics by G. H. Clutson and Richard
Tauber, adapted from 1921 Musical by Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly,
London, Lyric Theatre, 17 March 1942.
Crime and Punishment, adapted from the novel by Dostoyevsky, London, New Theatre, 26
June 1946 (9 September 1946, transferred to Globe Theatre, London); New York,
National Theatre, 22 December 1947.
Cupid and Mars, written with Robert G. Newton, adapted from Newton’s story, London, Arts
Theatre, 1 October 1947 [this play has also been titled A Multitude of Sins and To See Such
Fun ].
Diary of a Scoundrel, adapted from a play by Ostrovsky, London, Arts Theatre, 19 October
1949; 4 November 1956, Phoenix Theatre, London;
Before the Party, adapted from the short story by W. Somerset Maugham, London, St Martin’s
Theatre, 26 October 1949.
The Pink Room; or The Escapists, London, Lyric Hammersmith, 18 June 1952; revised as.
Absolute Hell, 1988.
A Dead Secret, London, Piccadilly Theatre, 30 May 1957.
Farewell, Farewell Eugene, adapted from the play by John Vari, London, Garrick Theatre, 5
June 1959; New York, Helen Hayes Theatre, 27 September 1960.
The Other Palace, Ealing, Questors Theatre, 5 December 1964.
Smithereens, Windsor, Theatre Royal, 1 October 1985.
Absolute Hell, Richmond, Orange Tree Theatre, 18 March 1988, Orange Tree Theatre; BBC2
Television 5 October 1991; London, Royal National Theatre, Lyttleton Theatre, 23 May
1995.
SELECTED MOTION PICTURES
Number Seventeen, written with Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville, based on the play and
novel by J. Jefferson Farjeon, British International, July 1932.
Bank Holiday [USA: Three on a Weekend ], written with Roger Burford, Gainsborough, January
1938.
The Silent Battle [USA: Continental Express ], written with Wolfgang Wilhelm, from the novel
by Jean Bommart, Pinebrook, March 1939.
George and Margaret, written with Brock Williams, based on play by Gerald Savory, First
National, March 1940.
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49th Parallel, written with Emeric Pressburger, based on a story by Pressburger, Ortus, 1941.
Dangerous Moonlight [USA: Suicide Squadron ], written with Shaun Terence Young and Brian
Desmond Hurst, based on Young’s novel, RKO, July 1941.
Hatter’s Castle, written with Paul Merzbach and Rudolf Bernauer, based on novel by A. J.
Cronin, Paramount, November 1941.
Uncensored, written with Terence Rattigan and Wolfgang Wilhelm, Gainsborough, July 1942.
Thursday’s Child, directed by Rodney Ackland, and written with Donald Macardle, based on
Macardle’s novel, Associated British Picture Corporation, March 1943.
Love Story, [USA: A Lady Surrenders ], written with Leslie Arliss and Doreen Montgomery,
from the novel by J. W. Drawbell, Gainsborough, October 1944.
Wanted for Murder written with Emeric Pressburger and Maurice Cowan, from the play by
Percy Robinson and Terence de Marney, Exclesior, March 1946.
Temptation Harbour, written with Victor Skutezky and Frederic Gotfort, from the novel by
Georges Simenon, Associated British Picture Corporation, January 1947.
The Queen of Spades, written with Arthur Boys, based on the novel by Alexander Pushkin,
Associated British Picture Corporation-World Screenplay, April 1949.
Bond Street, written with Anatole de Grunwald and Terence Rattigan, Associated British
Picture Corporation-World Screenplay, June 1948.
REFERENCES
Banbury, Frith. ‘The Trailblazer from Time Past.’ Guardian. (24 May 1995).
Barker, Frank Granville. ‘Why Don’t They Listen? ’ Plays and Players. iv, 12. (September 1957).
pp. 5, 9.
Chothia, Jean. English Drama of the Early Modern Period 1890-1940. Longman Literature in
English. London: Longman, 1996.
Duff, Charles. The Lost Summer: The Heyday of the West End Theatre. London: Heinemann Nick Hern, 1995.
Gore-Langton, Robert. ‘When Glory Comes Too Late.’ Daily Telegraph. (23 May 1995).
Jongh, Nicholas de. ‘A Memoir of Oblivion.’ Guardian. (10 March 1980). p. 9.
Marshall, Norman. ‘The Plays of Rodney Ackland.’ London Magazine. New Series. v, 1. (April
1965). pp. 62-67.
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Obituary. Daily Telegraph. (7 December 1991).
Smurthwaite, Nick. ‘Look Back in Sadness.’ Guardian. (15 March 1988).
Spurling, Hilary. ‘Neglected Master of the English Stage.’ Daily Telegraph. (22 March 1988). p.
14.
-----. ‘Reflections of Honesty.’ Obituary. Guardian. (7 December 1991).
Spurling, John. ‘Rodney Ackland.’ in: Contemporary Dramatists. Fourth. Edition. Edited by D.
L. Kirkpatrick and James Vinson. Chicago and London: St James's Press, 1988. pp. 7-9.
Williamson, Audrey. Theatre of Two Decades. New York and London: Macmillan, 1951.
Playscripts
Improper People. London: Heinemann, 1930.
Strange Orchestra. London: Victor Gollancz, 1932.
Dance With No Music. Year Book Press Series of Plays. London: H. F. W. Deane and Sons,
1933.
Birthday. London: Samuel French, 1935.
Plot Twenty-One. Typescript, 1936. Available in Theatre Museum, London,
After October. London: Victor Gollancz, 1936; also in: Famous Plays of 1935-6. London:
Gollancz, 1936. pp. 299-424.
Before The Party [based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham] in: Plays of the Year 1949.
Edited by J. C. Trewin. London and New York: Paul Elek, 1950.
The Escapists. [Typescript of The Pink Room ]. Royal Holloway: Founders Library. c.1952.
A Dead Secret. French's Acting Edition, No. 78. London: Samuel French, 1958.
Absolute Hell. London: Oberon, 1990.
Plays: One. Modern Playwrights. London: Oberon, 1997. [Contains The Dark River and After
October ]
Other writings
with Elspeth Grant. The Celluloid Mistress; or, The Custard Pie and Dr. Caligari. London: Allan
Wingate, 1954.
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‘From Komisarjevsky to Jonathan Miller.’ Spectator. (18 September 1976). pp. 34-35.
Rodney Ackland is one of a small class of playwrights whose lack of recognition has come to
be one of their most widely recognized features. From the mid eighties and through the
1990s, a number of revivals have begun to make Ackland rather famous for not being
famous. Ten years after his death, he would appear to have a foothold in the still limited
canon of mid-century British drama, alongside Coward, Rattigan and Priestley. His satirical
portraits of contemporary British society did not always endear him to audiences, but he had
commercial successes, mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly with adaptations like The
Old Ladies, Crime and Punishment, Diary of a Scoundrel and Before the Party.
However, he made his critical reputation and built up a coterie audience with original plays,
beginning with Improper People in 1929. The play premiered like many of Ackland’s other
works at the Arts Theatre, London; as a club theatre, the Arts was permitted by convention
to perform plays which had not been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, provided that its
audience members had paid an annual subscription. Ackland’s plays were not set amongst
the usual milieux of West End theatre; their bohemian characters, their unconventional
sexual lives and occasional explicitness of language were all features which would not have
endeared themselves to Britain’s theatre censor.
Coward, of course, had set his plays amongst this demi-monde, yet while Coward usually
celebrates their louche, promiscuous and amoral gaiety, Ackland has a much harsher edge.
His plays are satires aimed at the pretensions of this culture, and have an authentic anger in
them drawn deep from his own experience.
Ackland was born Norman Ackland Bernstein, the son of a Jewish businessman and a
musical comedy star, Ada Rodney, who specialised in principal boys. Ada retired to raise her
son, but in the mid 1910s the father’s business collapsed, and Ada was forced out of parental
retirement to support the family. Much of Rodney Ackland’s early life was spent touring
with his mother. The disparity between the genuine poverty of his home life and the
glittering whirl of the theatrical dressing room feeds directly into Ackland’s work. In After
October, the most plainly autobiographical of his plays, a impecunious and faded actress,
Rhoda Monkhams, and her family pin all their financial aspirations on the writer-son whose
play has been accepted for production. When the play inevitably flops, their hopes die with
it. In an era where theatrical glamour was a frequent subject for theatrical representation,
Ackland’s play is unusual in its continual depiction of the financial costs of this lifestyle, and
the ruinous self-absorption of the characters, whose failure to face up to economic realities is
largely responsible for their fate.
If this is all rather reminiscent of Chekhov, it is no coincidence. Ackland initially wanted to
follow his mother onto the stage, and aged fifteen landed a job in a young people’s theatre
troupe before becoming a member of J. B. Fagan’s Oxford Players, performing in Back to
Methusaleh amongst other plays. But his ambitions transferred across the footlights when he
went to see Komisarzhekvsky’s production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at Barnes in 1926. As
Ackland recalled it in an article for the Spectator fifty years later, ‘Halfway through the second
act something happened to me that was to affect the whole of my life [...] at a most unlikely
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moment during the performance a flash of illumination seemed to expand my seventeenyear old consciousness and I experienced an epiphany. At the end of the play, I left the
theatre and boarded a Number 9 bus for home in a state of exaltation so above and beyond
myself that I forgot to go backstage after the job. A week later I started on a one act play.
Furthermore, I finished it. I was a writer. I had found my vocation’.
Komisarzhevsky’s Chekhov productions had a decisive impact on many British writers of
the period, including Rattigan, N. C. Hunter, and Ronald Mackenzie, but Ackland applied
Chekhov’s dramaturgical lessons more rigorously and consistently than anyone else. In After
October, Rhoda Monkhams closely resembles Ranayevskaya from The Cherry Orchard, while her
son is a distant relation of Konstantin from The Seagull. But what Ackland also shares is the
critical ironizing distance that Chekhov maintains towards his characters; there are no heroes
in Ackland’s work. Even the potentially triumphant moments where his downtrodden
characters turn on their tormentors are artfully undermined. In After October, Clive is
incensed by a cruel review and in anger finds the critic’s number in the telephone directory,
pouring scornful and bitter hatred down the line, at the end of which he discovers he is
speaking only to a namesake. A similar scene appears in Absolute Hell, where a writer
confronts a critic for a particularly cruel review; the fire and acidity of his attack is sabotaged
by a drunk man who stands behind him mimicking his actions to the delight of all onlookers.
A mood of bitter melancholy pervades all his plays, yet given shape and clarity by the subtle
and witty manner in which he places the action against real political backgrounds, which act
as off-stage commentaries on the vulgarity of these narcissists: The Pink Room is set in a
drinking club in 1945 over the road from local Labour Party headquarters where they are
celebrating the Labour landslide; in The Dark River, the cosy nostalgia of the characters is
continually interrupted by noisy offstage demonstrations against European fascism.
While Ackland’s plays share formal affinities with Chekhov, for their subject matter they
draw on and feed into with Ackland’s own life. In After October, the hopes for Clive’s play
and its critical drubbing recall response to Ackland’s own early plays, particularly in the
harping on its dreary setting and unappetizing characters. A central moment in which a
female character’s wig is yanked off, would later become a miniature climax in The Pink
Room. At the end of After October, Clive determines to write his way out of his despair by
basing a play on a young man’s playwriting failure and how this affects the aspirations of his
family, which appears to be the very play we have been watching.
The commercial success of After October was unusual. Earlier plays like Improper People, Dance
with No Music, Strange Orchestra, and Birthday were admired, but his main commercial successes
were with intelligent, economical and subtle adaptations like The Old Ladies, a piece of
suburban Gothic taken from the novel by Hugh Walpole, Diary of a Scoundrel adapted from
Ostrovsky, and Crime and Punishment with John Gielgud, which transferred to the West End
for a long run.
One of his most disappointing failures was The Dark River. Similar to, but predating,
Rattigan’s After the Dance (1939), it is a savage indictment of the ‘bright young things’ of the
twenties who by the late thirties were neither any longer young nor bright. This gaietyobsessed generation was still persisting in playing the roles they had enjoyed in their youths,
against a much more bleak domestic backdrop of depression, unemployment and political
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unrest, and the increasingly obvious onset of war with the forces of fascism in Europe. It is
they whom the play angrily satirizes, following a group of them spending the summer in
their old schoolhouse, deliberately blinding themselves to the darkening international
picture.
The play is rich with metaphors underlining Ackland’s leftist authorial judgements; the
schoolhouse sits next to a stretch of stagnant backwater; the old teacher refuses to allow
clocks or newspapers in the house; the characters are writing autobiographies, replaying old
films from their youths and listening to piece of music called Narcisse. At the end of the play
these images come together in a grim warning of the conflicts to come, as the clocks start
ticking again and the sound of gunfire is heard booming in the distance.
The play received two performances at a club theatre in 1938, under the title Remembrance of
Things Past, but as hopes were repeatedly raised and dashed in the days of Chamberlain’s
shuttle diplomacy, the play’s pertinence seemed uncertain. By the time a production was was
put on the war had been running for four years, and the play’s moment had passed. Ackland
was protected from this disappointment however, having concentrated his energies
elsewhere, in a prolific series of admired screenplays, including 49th Parallel, Dangerous
Moonlight and Thursday’s Child, which he also directed, and in the successful adaptations which
comprised the bulk of his theatrical output in the 1940s.
In later years, at the lowest point in his fortunes, Ackland described himself as living a
Kafkaesque nightmare, being punished for a crime he was not aware of having committed.
The roots of his decline began in 1952 with the reception of The Pink Room. The play is set in
La Vie en Rose, a private drinking club with appropriately soft pink lighting. The club’s
clientele is made up of a louche heavy-drinking set of bohemians whose mutual antagonism,
fights and cruelty bring about the symbolic and literal destruction of La Vie en Rose.
Ackland’s affinity with a tradition of Russian writing, demonstrated in the Chekhovian
influences of the 1930s and his successful adaptation of Dostoyevsky, is also evident here in
a play which recalls Gorky’s The Lower Depths, a play in which Ackland once performed. The
play is an ensemble piece in which the forward movement of the play is one of a developing
mood choreographed across its unlovely, pitiable characters. In Strange Orchestra he had
attempted a similar structure, setting the play in a boarding house, overseen by the imperious
Vera and populated by eccentrics and bohemians, but in The Pink Room Ackland had gone
even further, allowing character and plot to yield throughout to a shifting and complex
patterning of characters which allowed the play to a emerge as a ‘state of the nation’ piece,
where the significance of the whole transcended the particularity of the characters.
In an era of foursquare well-made plotting, this was did not recommend itself to potential
producers. ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, the colossus of mid-century West End theatre, reputedly
described the play as ‘a libel on the British people’. The play had been written in the late
forties, and Frith Banbury and Tyrone Guthrie had both tried unsuccessfully to arrange a
production until Terence Rattigan put up the money, partly for tax reasons, but also due to a
longstanding admiration of writers like Ackland (and later Orton) who challenged English
moral complacency. The play received unfavourable reviews, but the death blow was
delivered by Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times, who announced that ‘on Wednesday
evening, the audience at Hammersmith had the impression of being present, if not at the
death of a talent, at least of its very serious illness [...] an evening of jaw-aching soul7
obliterating boredom’. Hobson was notorious for his determination to find a spark of
religious optimism in every play he saw, which produced some idiosyncratic readings of the
early Absurdist playwrights; here though the excoriating vision of British complacency
embodied in Ackland’s play gave no quarter to such pieties, and Hobson’s palpable rage was
the result. This reception of what Ackland considered his masterpiece was a devastating
blow; he was able to repeat Hobson’s review back word for word years after. His writing
dried up, producing only two minor plays afterwards, three rewrites and another adaptation.
What was also uncomfortable for many critics was the relatively explicit representation of
homosexuality. An elderly female critic, Ruby Bottomley, has a WREN companion, and they
refer to each other as Bill and Bert. The film director, Maurice Hussey, has an effeminate
manservant called Cyril Clatworthy. Camp exchanges flutter around La Vie en Rose and
despite the Lord Chamberlain’s insistence that Cyril should not ‘be played as a “pansy”’ nor
Bill ‘as a lesbian’, the significance of their relationships was not hard to detect. In this
Ackland was writing from experience. He was bisexual, and had for the last fifteen years
been in a relationship with a tempestuous Australian called Arthur Boys, a designer who had
created the claustrophobic set for After October in 1936. Ackland described Boys as ‘the
fiercest fighter on my behalf’, quite capable of menacing critics at first nights whom he
suspected of wanting to give Ackland a bad review.
The response to The Pink Room had badly shaken Ackland’s confidence. His thriller A Dead
Secret was a success, but Paul Schofield’s performance masked Ackland’s contribution. The
Other Palace, an ambitious comedy with an international cast of characters, only mustered an
amateur production. Ackland’s financial position, exacerbated by his own extravagance,
worsened, and writer’s block obstructed his one means of escape. Revivals of earlier plays
were not forthcoming; in 1956, the Court’s success with Look Back in Anger had been taken
by some as a reason to sweep away the previous generation of writers, and Ackland was
caught up in this unselective cull.
After he and Boys separated in the late 1940s, Ackland had struck up a new relationship with
Mab Poole, daughter of playwright Frederick Lonsdale. Mab and Rodney married in 1952.
But despite their consequently precarious financial situation, their relationship appears to
have been very happy, and their devotion to each other survived continual moonlight flits to
avoid landlords and other creditors. But in 1972, Mab died of throat cancer, and Rodney had
a breakdown, spending time in a psychiatric hospital and after a course of electroconvulsive
therapy, his memory was severely impaired. Ackland wrote nothing original again.
At his lowest ebb in the mid 1980s, he was discovered living in Richmond by Terry Todd, a
young man who decided to act as his companion, cooking and tidying for him. Todd was
intrigued by this lost playwright and doorstepped Sam Walters at the local Orange Tree
theatre, demanding that he read some of Ackland’s plays. In the late sixties, as the Lord
Chamberlain’s stage censorship was abolished Ackland had reworked three of his plays,
revising After October, overhauling Birthday as Smithereens, and The Pink Room as Absolute Hell.
Smithereens was produced by the ever-loyal Frith Banbury at the Theatre Royal Windsor, and
Sam Walters followed this with The Dark River and Absolute Hell at the Orange Tree. Revivals
of After October, The Old Ladies and A Dead Secret followed. These productions spearheaded a
major upturn in Ackland’s fortunes, and Absolute Hell was given productions by the BBC and
the National Theatre, where Ackland finally began to be recognised as one of the major
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talents of the mid-century. In 1980 a journalist interviewing Ackland had asked him how
posterity would see him. The answer was brusque but heartfelt: ‘Screw posterity; I want it
now when I’m still alive’. Ackland lived only to see the beginning of his gradual reemergence at the heart of the twentieth-century British theatre canon, but on the strength of
plays like Strange Orchestra, After October, The Dark River, and Absolute Hell, his place seems
assured.
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