Hugh Marriner is that romantic figure, a dissolute young man in need.
He needs to sell a story to his film director friend Maurice Hussey,
but he'll settle for a £200 loan. (This is London in the summer
of 1945, and most of his friends couldn't lend him £2.) He needs
some attention from Nigel, his companion of nine years, who is spending
his evenings with a
wealthy woman who he hopes will finance his dress designing career.
Most of all, Hugh needs a drink.
"As Ouspensky says, a drunk man in a pub who suddenly embraces his neighbor and then stands drinks all 'round," Hugh announces late one night, "is nearer to the truth of things as they really are, to reality, than any thin-lipped puritan will ever be."
And at La Vie en Rose — a homey private club where servicemen and bohemians drink rye, gin-and-French and black-market brandy, all that veritas is just the problem. La Vie en Rose is the setting of "Absolute Hell," Rodney Ackland's 1952 play (also known as "The Pink Room") about the necessity of escaping reality and the awful loneliness at the core of it. The BBC's excellent 1991 version of the play, starring Judi Dench, has its American premiere tomorrow night as the first presentation in Channel 13's "Out!" (programming in honor of Gay and Lesbian Pride Month).
Dame Judi plays Christine Foskett, the club's proprietor, a lonely middle-aged flirt with a soft spot for any man in uniform and an unfortunate tendency toward sudden mood swings. But then everyone at La Vie en Rose laughs a little too quickly and gets teary just as fast.
Hugh (Bill Nighy), a washed-up writer, is one of her regulars, surrounded by a colorful assortment of patrons. There's Maurice (Charles Gray), a big man who enjoys his power. Miss R. B. Monody (Betty Marsden), handsome in a pageboy and a man's suit, once gave Hugh's work a scathing review, which he's never forgotten. Sam Mitchum (Nathaniel Parker), an American Air Force officer, is an aspiring writer who worships Hugh and is singularly unimpressed with Maurice's offer to make him a movie star. Elizabeth Collier (Francesca Annis) is the picture of elegance, who upon seeing a photograph of her old friend Hetta in one of the German "horror camps" almost lets her concern for another human being affect her.
Outside the club's ground-floor window the neighborhood prostitute turns 25 tricks a night and a deranged elderly woman (Sheelagh Fraser, who died last year) shouts out the crucial message that "Jesus was born on Boxing Day."
La Vie en Rose's members are clever, but in general they are not kind people. They ridicule the old woman to her face, and they treat one another badly. So it's all the more impressive that Mr. Ackland easily makes us feel their pain. Anthony Page's direction is impressive, not least for his ability to make a dozen or so characters convincingly, sadly intoxicated in different ways.
In "Absolute Hell," people say what they think they mean. Christine hates Proust, with "all that wallowing about in the past instead of getting on with it." Nigel (Pip Torrens) sums up his objections to homosexuality: "The whole idea of queerness and everything connected with it — the whole ambience of boring camp, squalid promiscuity and hysterical emotionalism — I find unspeakably depressing."
One night a gun is fired, and a little ceiling damage changes everything. New plans and living arrangements have to be made. And somehow, in all the confusion, almost everyone at La Vie en Rose forgets to reach out.
ABSOLUTE HELL
Channel 13, New York, tomorrow night at 9
Directed by Anthony Page and based on Rodney Ackland's 1952 play. Simon
Curtis, producer.
WITH: Judi Dench (Christine Foskett), Bill Nighy (Hugh Marriner), Charles Gray (Maurice Hussey), Pip Torrens (Nigel), Sheelagh Fraser (Madge), Nathaniel Parker (Sam Mitchum), Betty Marsden (Miss Monody) and Francesca Annis (Elizabeth Collier). '
Thanks to Jan M for sending me this article which appeared in the New York Times on May 31, 2001 and to Emma for sending the picture which appeared in the New York Daily News TV Guide.