Ackland, Rodney
Ackland, Rodney ( 1908 – 91 ),playwright, greatly admired but considered insufficiently frivolous by West End managements in the 1930s; he has been described as ‘the English Chekhov’, the only playwright of his generation to see how Chekhov 's revolutionary dramatic technique might be joined to the robust native tradition of mixing tragedy with comedy. His best early plays—Strange Orchestra ( 1931 ), After October ( 1936 )—inhabit a world which recalls the seedy bohemian gentility of the novels of J. Rhys . Birthday ( 1934 ) is a study of hypocrisy and repression at work inside a comfortably respectable middle-class family. The Dark River ( 1941 ) is a grander and more sombre portrait of England in the shadow of the Second World War. The Pink Room ( 1952 ), a tragi-comedy set in the summer of 1945 in a seedy London club (based on the French Club in Soho), was reviewed...
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