“Absolute Hell” is a eulogy for “third places”

By N.P.B.

IN 1989 Ray Oldenburg, an American sociologist, explored the idea of the “third place”. Life, he argued, has always been experienced in one of three settings: the home, the workplace or a “third place” such as high streets, coffeehouses and pubs. These venues are neutral, largely free from the economic pressures of the office and the domestic pressures of the home. Mr Oldenburg considered these spaces to be the heart of the community and necessary to any healthy democracy: he worried that the suburbs emerging on the edges of American cities would lead to isolation and polarisation as people commuted by car, frequenting these places and interacting with their neighbours less.

A third place is at the heart of “Absolute Hell”, Rodney Ackland’s play, a new production of which has recently started at the National Theatre in London. Hugh Marriner (Charles Edwards) is fighting—and losing—a war on two fronts. He is trying to rescue a dying writing career: a critic has eviscerated his short stories, and nobody seems to have the time or the inclination to read his screenplay. Meanwhile, his closeted lover has tired of his drinking and decided to get married. The walls seem to be closing in.

Marriner’s crisis plays out in La Vie en Rose, a fictional drinking club in London’s Soho district. It is the summer of 1945: the fighting in Europe is over, the city is in ruins, the streets are heaving with refugees and a radical Labour government is imminent. Over the course of the play, 24 characters bounce off each other at what appears to be the social epicentre of the metropolis. Soldiers, artists, socialists and prostitutes flow through the bar where they are confronted by the frenetic Marriner and Christine Foskett (Kate Fleetwood), the club’s congenial host. Between them, Marriner and Foskett hold the wide and spasmodic subplots together as they absorb and externalise the chaos unfolding around them.

Marriner feels safe among friends, and almost seems to enjoy discussing his dysfunctional love life and his moribund career with them. But when his exasperated lover and his arch critic penetrate the walls of La Vie en Rose, his temperament immediately deteriorates. He breaks into tears as his former boyfriend denounces Marriner’s life of drinking, smoking and debt, rejecting his queer lifestyle as a “sexual disability”. These are the moments when the third place ceases to be a third place, and dissolves back into the rigid realities of the office and the bedroom.

First performed in 1952 as “The Pink Room”, Ackland’s play initially caused unease due to its departure from the mood of post-war optimism; one critic even described it as “a libel on the British people”. A year earlier, London had hosted the Festival of Britain on the South Bank of the River Thames to celebrate social and cultural recovery after years of air raids and rationing. Yet the perimeter of “The Pink Room” is perpetually patrolled by a dead-eyed prostitute rumoured to attract 25 customers a night—hardly an image of renewal and positivity.

Indeed, Ackland’s idea of hell wasn’t the austerity of war or the social attitudes of the time. The Soho of the 1940s is depicted as an island of sexual and cultural tolerance; in the La Vie en Rose even being German is considered acceptable. For Ackland, hell was the absence of other people. Characters unlucky enough to find themselves alone on stage almost immediately plunge into a state of despair: they feel secure only in the company of others. The group is immeasurably stronger than the psychological sum of its parts. At a time when the British were infamously reserved, candid expressions of loneliness found little applause, particularly at a time when the country was eager to look ahead to a more colourful and prosperous future.

“Absolute Hell” feels timely not only for its gloomy outlook and recognisably austere backdrop, but because third places are losing ground in modern cities. Social-media platforms have become the primary forum for social conversation. At the same time, gentrification has pushed the price of drinking in bars away from what many young people could afford as a habit. London has lost over 1,000 of its pubs since 2001. Many of those that haven’t been squeezed out by luxury property developers must cling on by squeezing their customers.

Marriner’s anxieties continue to resonate, too. His inability to impress his partner, his failure to find a sustainable career and the emasculating retreat to his mother’s spare bedroom will be uncomfortably familiar to a modern young audience. But the freedom he had to be himself in a welcoming third place, where everybody knew his name, may provoke some envy. “Do you know that feeling when you’re in a crowd of people all drinking and shouting, and nobody is listening and all at once you’re, as it were, drowned in a wave of love and understanding?” he muses. “For a split second you know your true identity.” None of the other characters seems to be listening, but Marriner hardly seems bothered. For that is the key to a good third place: it belongs to everybody, and to nobody.

“Absolute Hell” is showing at the National Theatre until June 16th