In 1995 it was directed at the National by Anthony Page, with a cast led by Judi Dench at her incandescent best.
It is now revived by Joe Hill-Gibbins, a director who, in my experience, doesn’t ask what he can do for a play so much as what he can do to it.
From the opening moments, when virtually the entire cast troops in front of the curtain to sing the Edith Piaf standard, La Vie en Rose, simply because that is the name of the club in which the action takes place, Hill-Gibbins hits the wrong note.
The failed artists, bohemians, black marketeers and slumming socialites who frequent the club (loosely based on Muriel Belcher’s Colony Rooms), in an effort to hide from both the horrors of war and the privations of peace, are at best unlikable and at worst reprehensible.
Yet, in Page’s production, they aroused the classic emotions of pity and horror. Here, they simply induce revulsion.
Performances from normally reliable actors such as Jonathan Slinger, Jenny Galloway and Lloyd Hutchinson are so grossly exaggerated that they evoke the Weimar world of Otto Dix rather than the Soho world of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.
Kate Fleetwood is not an actress who exudes warmth and, in her hands, Christine Foskett, the club owner, becomes little more than a hysterical slattern.
There is better work from Danny Webb, Joanna David and Patricia England and, in particular, Charles Edwards, whose poignant performance as Hugh Marriner, the alcoholic gay writer who has squandered his talents, has an emotional depth lacking elsewhere.
With its cast of 37, many of whom do little but fill the corners of Lizzie Clachan’s ugly and overblown set (and in these financially straitened times, such a superfluity of actors is itself a cause for concern), Hill-Gibbins’ production is disastrously misconceived.
Worst of all, it exposes the verbosity, crudity and misogyny of Ackland’s script, which Page so skilfully concealed.
(Tickets 020 7452 3000/nationaltheatre.org.uk; £15-67)
