With the recent announcement of the closure of Soho denizen Wardour News, a play about the final days of a crumbling Soho institution seems to take on a new significance. With the small difference that fictional Christine Foskett of Absolute Hell is not forced to close her doors due to rent hikes or gentrification, but because the building is literally falling apart. Still, both seem to symbolise the end of an era, and the change in the fabric of a community. Foskett's club, La Vie en Rose (the Pink Room of the play's original title) is the favoured spot of gaggle of Soho luvvies: artists, film-types, G.Is and society ladies, a place where anything goes and all sexual preferences are welcome. 

Over the course of three hours, playwright Rodney Ackland introduces us to the lives and lusts of the club's clientele, set against the backdrop of a recovering, post-war Britain, on the eve of a Labour victory.  The play originally opened in 1952, closing after three weeks of biting criticism. It was only in the 1980s, when theatre censorship was a thing of the past, that Absolute Hell (as it was then renamed) had another chance in the limelight, with significant cuts and rewrites. Despite these, the play retains its epic proportions: a sprawling tableau of London in 1945, with over 21 characters mooching on and offstage.

The company Photo: Johan Persson

The sheer vastness of the play is perhaps its weakest point: with so many characters to reckon with, the audience's sympathy is stretched thin. With almost no history or background to fill them out, much of the ensemble are reduced to 2D caricatures, brought onstage merely to elicit some hollow laughs about the drunken, debauched society they represent. Some of them hit the mark: Eileen Marsh does a brilliant turn as a barmy Boxing Day evangelist Madge, and Patricia England makes a charmingly dotty Julia, mastering an extended joke about Siegfried Sassoon. Others fall short, with genuine feeling lost in all the posturing and hamminess.

Charles Edwards as Hugh Marriner. Photo: Johan Persson

The production's brilliance lies chiefly in the hands of its three protagonists, and none more so than Charles Edwards as the harried writer Hugh Marriner. Lovelorn and desperate, Edwards expertly shifts between the layers of Marriner's psyche, the words tripping off his tongue as he moves from  from plaintive appeals for affection, to needling requests for cash, to virulent exclamations of anger, all at lightning-speed. He offers an authenticity of character that seems lacking elsewhere in the piece, backed up by Sinéad Matthews as femme-fatale Elizabeth Collier and Kate Fleetwood as the woe-begotten proprietress, Christine.

Kate Fleetwood as Christine Fockett. Photo: Johan Persson

Despite appearances, Absolute Hell is not all black-market scotch and orgies,  and Director Joe Hill-Gibbons brings out the more poignant elements of Ackland's script to land sufficient blows on the audience. The references to the Holocaust (thought to be one of the earliest in British theatre) are chilling even in their sparseness, and there is painfully resonant relevance in Elizabeth Collier's insistence that, if she'd only gotten round to voting, she might have been able to make a difference to her country. The gay music and silliness are a garish reminder of the destruction they are ignoring outside of the crumbling building, and as they say themselves, they all go to La Vie en Rose to escape reality. This element is brilliant reflected in Lizzie Clachan's set design: a large mirror dominates one wall, in order to cover up the bomb damage from the Blitz. With the war and the world held successfully at bay, all the clientele can see are themselves.

Absolute Hell runs at the Lyttelton, National Theatre until 16 June. You can buy tickets on the official website.  
All photos (c) Johan Persson, courtesy of the National Theatre