THE CHALK GARDEN. To 2 August.
London.
THE CHALK GARDEN
by Enid Bagnold.
Donmar Warehouse To 2 August 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm.
Audio-described 12 July 2.30pm (+Touch Tour 1.30pm).
BSL Signed 21 July.
Captioned 17 July 7.30pm.
Runs 1hr 55min One interval.
TICKETS: 0870 060 6624 (no booking fee).
www.donmarwarehouse.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 14 June.
A Chalk Garden as fruitful as there’s likely to be.
It’s worse, says a character in Enid Bagnold’s 1955 play, to grow old-fashioned than merely to grow old. Which is ironic, for no sooner was the play seen in the West End than it was swept aside as out-of-date in the wake of the Angry brigade. And, despite occasional revivals, Bagnold’s star never re-ascended with the more celebrated victims of theatre’s 1956 revolution.
In another irony, it’s taken as highly-fashionable a theatre as the Donmar to reassert so deeply unfashionable a play and show its strength of language, character and theme. Aptly so, for The Chalk Garden is about the struggle between new and old, between life and death.
Teenage Laurel lives with her grandmother while her own mother’s away. Felicity Jones’ vibrant creation of Laurel’s youthful brightness, showing a young mind’s spontaneous confusion between truth and wish, is so fresh and appealing it’s easy to miss how her bad behaviour (a tendency to offstage shouting and arson included) displays that, like the plants in Mrs St Maugham’s chalk garden, she’s being destroyed by inappropriate treatment.
They keep dying under directions from the dying butler, with his fossilised traditions. His ignorance and St Maugham’s negligence place them both among the dying breeds, she being a Lady Bracknell at the fag-end of her type. A new, renewing voice comes with Miss Madrigal, Laurel’s paid companion.
Like others here, she has a secret in her past. But it’s one that has given her a new life, despite the earlier actions of the somnolent judge who comes calling. Michael Grandage’s airy production points up the similarity of manner with Christopher Fry. There aren’t the same flights of images, nor Fry’s actual verse. But characters play upon the ornamentation of ideas in these lyrical performances.
At the centre is a splendid duel between Margaret Tyzack’s St Maugham, a commanding presence, colourful in voice and movement, forever probing with the confidence of the arid old establishment, and Penelope Wilton, reserved, cautious yet assertive of a new way, caring for plants and people. It’s a battle of wills played out in a remarkable contrast of styles.
Miss Madrigal: Penelope Wilton.
Maitland: Jamie Glover.
Second Applicant: Steph Bramwell.
Laurel: Felicity Jones.
Third Applicant/Nurse: Linda Broughton.
Mrs St Maugham: Margaret Tyzack.
Olivia: Suzanne Burden.
Judge: Clifford Rose.
Director: Michael Grandage.
Designer: Peter McKintosh.
Lighting: Paule Constable.
Sound/Composer: Adam Cork.
Assistant director: Abbey Wright.
2008-06-17 08:45:05