Rodney Ackland: 5 books

No other major playwright of the last 50 years has undergone such a reappraisal as Rodney Ackland. Interest in his work has renewed in the 1990s, starting at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, with further revivals at many theatres, including the Chichester Festival Theatre and the Royal National...

Rodney Ackland is belatedly acknowledged as a master of the British stage, now captivating new audiences. In The Dark River, set in the late thirties, the flamboyant characters are cocooned in a Thames backwater ignoring the turbulent events of a politically unstable Europe. After Octoberntroduces...

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...

‘Listen: things will be different after the play comes on – completely different… Only a few more weeks, Francie, and you’ll see. Your whole life will change. I promise you it will.’ Hampstead, 1936. In a shabby basement flat, aspiring playwright Clive Monkhams dreams of a West End...

‘But darling what will people think if the sister’s wearing mourning and the widow’s dressed in pink?’ The war is over and the Skinner family are trying to return to normal. If only the blasted Government weren’t such a nuisance about the rations and Cook could get some more of those...