Before the Party

Rodney Ackland's first play Improper People was produced at the Arts Theatre Club, London in 1929, but it was not until 1932 that Ackland's work finally reached the West End, when his fourth play, Strange Orchestra, transferred from the Embassy, Swiss Cottage to the St. Martin's, St. Martin's Lane. The transfer caused James Agate of the Sunday Times to observe that the other work on the West End bore as much resemblance to Strange Orchestra "as unbleached calico to tattered silk." The Dark River, produced at the Whitehall Theatre and revived at the Orange Tree in 1985, was acclaimed by Hilary Spurling in the Spectator as "perhaps one of the indisputably great plays of the past half-century in English."