The Slaves of Solitude

Solitude Sometimes Is

The Slaves of Solitude

by Simon Roberts, adapted from the novel by Patrick Hamilton

The Questors at the Questors Studio, Ealing until 11^th May

Review by Andrew Lawston

There’s nothing in the shops, people keep asking if your journey is essential, people with unpleasant political opinions just can’t keep quiet, and the Prime Minister’s voice is everywhere.  Thankfully we’re not back in lockdown.  Rather, the Studio at Ealing’s Questors Theatre is whisking us away to the beer-sodden wartime world of Patrick Hamilton’s novel The Slaves of Solitude, courtesy of a new adaptation by Simon Roberts.

In 1943, the fictional commuter town of Thames Lockdon, spinster Enid Roach endures a miserable winter at the Rosamund Tea Rooms, among a motley cross-generational assortment of people displaced by the war.  She has a half-hearted romance with an American GI who takes his meals at the boarding house, enjoys a fractious friendship with her rival Vicki Kugelmann, and clashes with the pompous Mr Thwaites.

Against this backdrop of course, the Second World War rages in Europe and beyond, while similar conflicts are played out in microcosm in Thames Lockdon.  Ray Dunning’s set amounts to a large, open playing area where a huge monochrome Union Flag overlays the US Stars and Stripes, reflecting that culture clash, and furniture is brought on and carried off as required.  The play takes place over the course of many chunky scenes in the tea rooms, various local pubs, and other locations around Thames Lockdon, and the cast are clearly well-drilled at moving the furniture into place swiftly as director John Davey keeps the pace up throughout this somewhat wordy play.

Terry Mummery’s lighting is simple and effective, with warm yellows in interior scenes, and starker lights for outdoor scenes and other locations.  There are also several atmospheric sections where the lights dim, Dennis Dracup’s evocative soundtrack kicks in, and the cast narrate passages, chorus-style.  This all neatly breaks up the pattern of characters moving from tea room to pub and back again.

Sherralyn leads the cast as Miss Roach, a quietly miserable publisher’s secretary who has been forced to move out to Thames Lockdon.  It’s a commanding performance that draws the whole play together – she draws the audience’s attention even during lengthy sections where she has no lines and is quietly reacting to the other characters.

There are several potential antagonists for Miss Roach, but the most enjoyable by far is Mr Thwaites, a pompous older gentleman who is played with more avuncular charm by John Dobson than might be suggested by the more obviously Nazi-sympathising character in the novel.  Dobson manages a deft balancing act, however, of getting laughs in the tea room scenes while still revealing the man’s vicious personality in quick barked asides and barbed remarks.

Lieutenant Dayton Pike, played with easy charm by Guy Jack, courts Miss Roach with dogged insistence, even when it becomes clear that his attention is elsewhere.  The US officer frequently reveals a quiet belligerence that never quite surfaces, as he becomes more objectionable, and drunk, as the play progresses.  In a neat touch from Hamilton and Roberts, the glamorous American officer turns out to have a post-war dream of getting into the practical but decidedly unglamorous laundry business, swiftly puncturing his mystique for both the audience and for Enid Roach.

Claudia Carroll’s character Vicki Kugelmann, a German who moves into the Rosamund Tea Rooms after befriending Enid Roach, is an enigma.  Carroll has enormous fun vamping around the stage, and Thames Lockdon, entrancing Pike and Mr Thwaites, among others, but for all that she seems to be in much the same position as Miss Roach herself, and it’s not long before the two are striking sparks at the dinner table.

Observing and commenting on the action, while rarely intervening directly, are Mrs Barratt and Miss Steele, two older ladies who, it seems, we might consider to be Roach and Kugelmann’s future equivalents.  Lisa Day is hugely entertaining as the nervous Mrs Barratt, and Anne Neville throws in laconic good sense every so often as Miss Steele, especially as she hardens against Kugelmann and Thwaites in the mealtime melodramas.

Despina Sellar has a small but pivotal role as Mrs Payne the landlady, who begins the play as every stereotypical landlady from the era with her strict instructions to her guests, but who reveals a deeply compassionate nature over the course of the story.  And Ruby Barry is enormous spirited fun as the maid Sheila, to the point of making energetic animal noises at Mr Thwaites during one of his more objectionable rants.

Rounding out the cast are Anthony Green who is a calm oasis in the miserable turmoil of Roach’s life as her employer Mr Lindsell, Alex Hunter who begins the play as Pike’s comrade Lieutenant Mike Lummis, but who changes sides during the interval to become Mr Lindsell’s budding artist nephew, John Lindsell.  Green seems to relish the contrast between the slightly dim and comedic Lummis, and the eager and rather earnest Lindsell.

Finally David Sellar gives a twinkling performance as Mr Prest, a retired actor who finds himself called back into performing as all the younger actors are serving in the forces.  For much of the play he is a somewhat enigmatic figure who keeps deliberately aloof from the daily dramas of the tea rooms, and when he dashes off on Christmas Day, Roach sweetly wonders whether he might be Father Christmas.

A play that starts off by appearing to focus on the old “overpaid, oversexed and over here” adage about American GIs, swiftly moves into exploring the ugly political views lying beneath the surface of a nation seemingly united against the Nazi regime.  Then, there are lengthy comments on the lack of goods in the shops, and sugar rationing.  By the time the play sets its sights on the half-hearted love triangle between Pike, Kugelmann and Roach, it’s clear that the real problem is that absolutely everything in Thames Lockdon is awful, and that you’re probably better off staying in London to dodge air raids.

Faced with the rather squalid business of living out of suitcases in converted tea rooms in a country on its knees after four gruelling years of war, Pike, Kugelmann and sometimes Roach herself choose to get merrily drunk as a form of escapism.  And Roach in particular comes to discover that even these brief moments of nocturnal freedom have unpleasant social consequences.

The Slaves of Solitude is a truly funny play about miserable people, many of whom we suspect are locked into certain patterns of behaviour, and it’s only the characters who strive to break those patterns that appear to end the play with a more positive outlook.  The play, the novel, and Patrick Hamilton’s work in general, are all highly recommended.

Andrew Lawston, May 2024

Photography courtesy of Questors