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Actress Fenella Woolgar is no stranger to period dramas. She’s wonderful at mining their trademark stiff-upper-lip-ness for the emotion, like a ripple breaking the surface. She can make your heart ache with little more than the tense set of her jaw. That skill is on display in this new stage adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel, ‘The Slaves of Solitude’.
Woolgar is Miss Roach, a secretary whose life has been upended by the Blitz, depositing her into a boarding house in Henley-on-Thames. She reluctantly shares space with two older women, an actor and the poisonous, puffed-up Mr Thwaites, who harasses her for being a Russian sympathiser. Then she falls for African American soldier Pike and her German friend Vicki Kugelmann moves in.
There’s some potent stuff here about the devastation that war can cause, far from the front-lines. Society is caught in crisis, a hole blown in its sense of itself as surely as Miss Roach’s flat was obliterated by a bomb. She’s a refreshingly complex character in Woolgar’s hands: withdrawn but not naive, serious but not humourless. She’s more than the cliched ‘lonely spinster’.
But while adaptor Nicholas Wright sketches in Hamilton’s other characters, he doesn’t seem sure of how to handle them. Lucy Cohu is a vivid presence as Miss Roach’s frenemy, Kugelmann, but the play deals clumsily with her outsider status. Daon Broni’s lieutenant Pike has the same problem. Quite aside from Broni’s dodgy US accent, he really never snaps into focus. Clive Francis, though, is venomously good as Mr Thwaites.
Nonetheless, in spite of the issues, Jonathan Kent’s production – while sometimes veering a little too broadly between comedy and tragedy – is never boring. Designer Tim Hatley’s sliding-screen set is a beautiful swoosh between sumptuously detailed tearoom, bar and hotel room, even in spite of a technical hitch when I saw it. It provides an atmospheric backdrop to Woolgar’s powerfully resonant portrayal of Miss Roach.