The Slaves of Solitude, theatre review: Satisfaction is on the ration in wartime tale

The notion of the Second World War home front in the Home Counties conjures up a certain set of expectations. One of the many pleasures of Patrick Hamilton’s eponymous and much-admired 1947 – but set in 1943 – novel is the way he toys with, and sometimes entirely upends, these preconceived ideas, as Sarah Waters did with wartime tropes some decades later in The Night Watch. A stage adaptation, especially one directed by the masterful Jonathan Kent (Young Chekhov, Good People), was therefore an enticing prospect.

Unfortunately, the inescapable fact is that this project is not entirely successful. The trouble with Nicholas Wright’s adaptation is that he fails to establish a base line of normality, of the dreary grind of everyday life and privation in a Henley-on-Thames boarding house, from which events will gradually but startlingly deviate. Without this sure foundation, everything and everyone seems a little weak and insubstantial.

Our heroine is gently open-hearted Miss Roach (Fenella Woolgar), an unmarried publisher’s reader of a certain age who is quietly stagnating while life passes her by. The arrival into the quotidian tedium of the boarding house of flirtatious German Vicki (Lucy Cohu), decidedly not the stoic refugee so beloved of wartime literature, and amorous, inebriated African-American solider Lieutenant Pike (Daon Broni) quickly destabilises Miss Roach in more ways than one.

That fine actress Woolgar, a standout in so many period pieces on both stage and screen, gives a nuanced and delicate turn as a lonely woman who hasn’t given up on the idea of companionship, love and physical pleasure.

There’s amusing support from Clive Francis as Mr Thwaites, an irascible fellow lodger who specialises in needling Miss Roach. Yet satisfaction overall is on the ration.

Until Nov 25, Hampstead Theatre; hampsteadtheatre.com