The Slaves of Solitude, Hampstead Theatre, London, review: Needs more of a sense of purpose

Jonathan Kent directs Nicholas Wright's stage adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's novel, but despite its flaws, Fenella Woolgar is perfect in the leading role as Miss Roach

Fenella Woolgar as Miss Roach in 'The Slaves of Solitude' at Hampstead Theatre, (Manuel Harlan)

Spam fritters consumed at separate tables, ration books, blackouts, the influx of American soldiers – Nicholas Wright’s stage adaptation of the eponymous novel by Patrick Hamilton transports us back to the home front in December 1943 and focuses on the lonely lives endured by the guests at a bleakly genteel boarding house in Henley-on-Thames. Miss Roach, a publisher’s reader in her late thirties, has washed up there, having been bombed out of her London flat.

Her war effort now seems to consist of stomaching meal times with the sparse grey flock of fellow residents – retired ladies, a superannuated comedian and Mr Thwaites, the blazered bane of her existence, whose monstrous vigour and narrow-minded right-wing gusto are vividly captured here by Clive Francis.

Thwaites systematically persecutes her with poisonous digs at her failure to find a husband and at her mild pro-Russian sympathies and by his incessant jocular mangling of the English language. “Dost thou anticipate a fellow devourer of the evening victuals?” he asks, knowing full well that Miss Roach is embarking on a relationship with “Lootenant” Dayton Pike, a GI who in Wright’s adaptation becomes African American (our “dusky combatant from distant shores” as Thwaites needlingly puts it). The delicate balance of the heroine’s world is further disturbed when Vicki Kugelmann, a flirtatiously extrovert German refugee, moves in and wreaks emotional havoc.

Patrick Hamilton is best-known to theatre-goers for his old-fashioned but effective melodramas, such as Gaslight and Rope (both made into celebrated films). His novels are moodier, melancholic affairs, pervaded by the smell of booze and down-at-heel defeat, even if The Slaves of Solitude can claim to have more comic vision and ends on note of tentative hope. I’m not sure that it is wise of this stage version to kick off with a flash-forward to a histrionic moment of crisis. It needs, you may reckon, to establish the grinding tedium of the daily routine at the boarding house before signalling so incontrovertibly that this will be shattered.

There are other puzzling decisions. A very interesting essay in the programme discusses how African-American GIs experienced less racial prejudice on this side of the pond during the war. But, though he’s well played Daon Broni, Pike, with his fondness for the bottle and the ladies, feels underdeveloped as a black character, never seeming to raise the dramatic stakes or snap into focus.

Jonathan Kent’s fine production moves at a meditative pace, the scrim and the sliding lateral “wipe” in Tim Hatley’s design allowing one scene to dissolve into another as the play shifts from dining room to pub to the river bank under a bomber’s moon where we see the lovers through a screen of rushes. The main draw is Fenella Woolgar who is perfect casting as Miss Roach – a gangly, beautifully nuanced and self-thwarting mix of boldness and English reserve (“I do have a first name, but I don’t encourage people to use it...”), her disgust almost lurid when she’s forced into a late-night bacchanal awash with the pickled-walnut Martinis dispensed by her vivacious German rival (Lucy Cohu).

Gwen Taylor plays twin sisters, one a brisk GP who professes that she has never been happier than now, coming out of retirement for the war effort: “It’s my opinion that if one is lonely at a time like this, then one deserves to be,” she declares in a not-so-veiled rebuke to the rest of them. Empathetic to lives that have come adrift, this is a good show, but one that itself could do with mustering more of a sense of purpose.

The Slaves of Solitude, Hampstead Theatre, London. Ends 25 November. boxoffice@hampsteadtheatre.com