The Chalk Garden

The blessed Kenneth Tynan reviewed Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden at its London premiere in 1956 and wrote that it 'may well be the finest artificial comedy to have flowed from an English (as opposed to an Irish) pen since the death of Congreve.'  After seeing Michael Grandage's revival at the Donmar, I have to wonder whether Tynan had his tongue in his cheek, or was he just having one of his masochist days? This production has been widely praised and some of the acting is excellent, but I'm mystified by the prevailing opinion that this is some kind of lost masterpiece. I think it's a case of Donmar's Law, which states that any play looks several times better than it really is on the Donmar's intimate stage. This is a very amateurish drawing room comedy about the eccentric English middle classes and their even more eccentric servants, written by a lady who thought she could write like Noel Coward, but couldn't.  It inhabits the same kind of England that Coward used as a backdrop for Relative Values -- essentially a 1950s world which is really the 1930s, lightly retouched to reflect the shortage of servants.  The trouble is that while Bagnold tries to imitate Coward's style of wit, her one-liners and attempts at Wildean turns of phrase are irredeemably feeble, and she lacks Coward's hard edge. The characters are of solid cardboard and the plot is creakingly implausible.  An elderly lady employs a mysterious middle-aged woman as a companion for her out-of-control 16-year-old granddaughter, whose mother has remarried.  The elderly lady invites an old friend who is a judge to lunch, who turns out to have been the very judge who once upon a time...no, I can't go on, it's too ridiculous. Yes, I know Oedipus killed his father and married his mum and Shakespeare used coincidences too, but there's a limit.  The play features a harassed manservant, an offstage bedridden butler with dictatorial habits, and lots of jokes about gardening.  Do you find any mention of pelargoniums and bedding plants hilarious?  I can't say I do, but the audience at the Donmar, most of whom seemed to be the kind of people who hadn't been near a theatre since 1956, clearly did.  Normally the Donmar has a rather funky audience, with lots of theatrical professionals trying to be incognito (I once sat next to Piers Brosnan), but for this play the punters are a generation older. They certainly know one end of a pelargonium from another.  This is the kind of safe middle class play for the gardening classes that once flourished at the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford, or at the Chichester Festival Theatre when it was becalmed.  It appeals to people who don't like swearing or actors taking their clothes off, and aren't sure about all this Osborne-Pinter-Stoppard modern nonsense.  Sometimes a hoary old text gets thrillingly reinvented by the imagination of a director, the best example being Stephen Daldry's revival of An Inspector Calls in the 1990s.  Here Michael Grandage plays it absolutely straight, with no attempt to rethink the play, so its defects are undisguised.  The set by Peter McKintosh is lovely and reminded me of my late mother-in-law's house in Sussex;  Margaret Tyzack, who is certainly old enough to have acted in the play first time around, is a sheer delight as the old lady;  Penelope Wilton is very good as the woman of mystery who may or may not have committed a murder; and the rest of the cast perform with great aplomb.  But unfortunately an old piece of cheese which has been dropped behind the fridge for 50 years is still an old piece of cheese, even if you serve it up on a Wedgwood plate.  Of course, there's an audience out there for old cheese, as I was reminded as I left the Donmar and walked back towards St Martin's Lane.  I turned the corner and there it was -- another play just like this one -- The Mousetrap.