Rodney Ackland was inspired to work in the theatre by seeing a season of Chekhov plays in the 1920s. He trained as an actor at Central School, and acted professionally for the rest of the 1920s, but became a playwright in the 1930s. No fewer than 14 new plays of his were performed during that decade, the most famous ones being Strange Orchestra, The Old Ladies (adapted from Hugh Walpole) and After October. He continued writing in the 1940s, when The Questors presented world premieres of two of his works: The Dark River in 1943, and The Diary of a Scoundrel (adapted from Ostrovsky, later retitled Too Clever by Half) in 1946.

In the 1940s Ackland moved into films: he wrote screenplays (49th Parallel, Hatter's Castle, Uncensored, Thursday's Child, The School Teacher, The Queen of Spades) and also directed two of them (Thursday's Child, The School Teacher).

None of his original plays was a great commercial success: they were not right for their time. The critics were wary of them, and they had very limited public appeal. They were considered highbrow (something generally undesirable in those days). Until the 1950s, only the drawing room comedy or the light musical had much chance of attracting any substantial West End audience. People did not want plays that held a mirror up to the world or human nature, and most certainly not their world or their nature. Yet Ackland wrote well made plays: immaculately constructed, beautifully characterised and observed. So when Look Back in Anger came along, and the whole theatre underwent a revolution, Ackland, whose plays really belonged with those of the new wave, was categorised as a playwright of the past and almost entirely forgotten.

This was partly also because he had stopped writing for several years after The Pink Room in 1952. The Pink Room was the first version of Absolute Hell. It opened to such cruelly damning press notices that it closed after a handful of performances and Ackland's confidence as a writer was shattered. His problem was as usual that he was too bold. He dared to suggest that during the second world war there were men and women who were not heroes, doing their bit for victory, but rather who had spent the war drowning out reality in seedy drinking clubs. It was described as "a libel on the British people". The nation still wanted to be proud of itself and its victory. It did not want to be reminded of any truth about itself. And the play was Chekhovian: it had a very large number of characters and no recognisable plot. And perhaps the most serious crime of all - it ridiculed the character of an elderly literary critic. This is what Harold Hobson had to say in the Sunday Times:

"On Wednesday evening the audience at Hammersmith had the impression of being present, if not at the death of a talent, at least at its very serious illness." It is a sad thing to have to say of a man of Mr Ackland's past that his latest work has no wit; that it has no fire; that one of its scenes - in which an elderly female critic has her wig pulled off - must be one of the least creditable to author, players, producer, and management in stage memory; that its writer seems to have read nothing before or after The Cherry Orchard."

After The Pink Room, Ackland wrote little more for the theatre. The Questors did another world premiere of his plays, The Other Palace in 1964, but it was not taken up by any West End management.

But in recent years Ackland has started to be rediscovered. Too Clever by Half was performed at the National in 1988; he rewrote The Pink Room as Absolute Hell and it was performed at the Orange Tree in 1987, on BBC TV in 1991 and at the National in 1995, gaining Judi Dench a best actress Olivier award for her role as Christine. Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, in last year's Changing Stages television series, picked out Rodney Ackland as one of the best forgotten playwrights of the 20th century.

By the time Ackland rewrote The Pink Room as Absolute Hell, not only had tastes changed, but the Lord Chamberlain's censorship had gone as well. In the original version Ackland had had to disguise the numerous homosexual relationships, do without the bad language that even in the 1940s was a normal part of bohemian speech, and make the sexual content of the play much milder. So the original was an emasculated, even bastardised version of the play he really wanted to write. The central character, Hugh Marriner, in the original had a self-righteous wife. In Absolute Hell he has a long-standing male lover. Whether that was one of its problems is uncertain, but most likely in 1951 Absolute Hell would have caused even greater outrage than The Pink Room.

Tyrone Guthrie wrote a preface for the play in 1951 - but publication was withdrawn after it flopped. He said:

"In my opinion the play has virtue not only as drama, but a piece of evidence about a significant historical period. The conventional reaction to it is that it is about a lot of degenerate people; and that there is something disloyal about admitting the existence of such life in the London that could 'take it' in the very testing years 1941-45. Well, I don't admit these characters are more degenerate than the average specimen. They are only more candidly analysed. I don't hold that the good name of London is glorified by being sentimental. I believe that this play with its brilliant evocation of an environment and an atmosphere that, if not conventional, are certainly typical of the time - all large communities had their Pink Rooms - will be of considerable historical interest. And if people turn to it for historical evidence, they will, I think and hope, be rewarded by the discovery of a piece of exquisite and intricate theatrical craftsmanship - a symphony in the Chekhov manner - many voices, many themes, woven together in a loose but distinguished pattern."

David Emmet