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Let
me tell you about how I learnt to stop worrying and love the bourgeoisie.
Rodney Ackland's Strange Orchestra was written in 1932 as a challenge
to the drawing room drama that was prevalent at the time, that is the
'anyone for tennis' school of drama full of bright young things or shallow
middle class dilletantes depending on your point of view. Strange
Orchestra is set in a flat in the Bohemian London of the thirties.
The action revolves around an eccentric landlady Vera, her three adult
children and her five guests, whose already chaotic lives are further
complicated by the arrival of Peter, a charismatic self-styled artist.
Some regard Ackland as a forerunner to the likes of Osbourne and Pinter
a few decades later. Ironically the theatricality of the play resembles
the drawing room drama it is subverting, and understandably its radical
intent may be lost on a contemporary audience. However it is more than
a period piece. It is Chekovian in style in that it is not about anything
in particular, there are a variety of dramas going on independently
to create a microcosm or snapshot of a particular stratum of society
at a particular time.
Ackland is interested in ideas but he does not use his characters as
mouthpieces, this preserves the dramatic integrity of the characters
but the level of the debate tends to reflect their naivety and youthful
idealism. It's important to add, however, that in 1932 memories of the
first world war were still fresh in the mind, there was no welfare state
and war was likely to mean conscription, so young people had plenty
to concentrate their minds. These days we are sceptical about politics
and tend to regard any political vision as naive or idealistic.
These days too there seems to be a common acceptance that we are all
middle class now or at least we could be, but this is nonsense. Wealth
and success are relative, and middle class (or middle anything) is a
relative position. The problem of the middle class is that to be truly
universal it would have to abolish itself as a class. Whatever it tells
us about class now or then, this is an enjoyable and imaginative production.
Till 20
March 2004
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