The Chalk Garden

Published Thursday 12 June 2008 at 12:20 by Heather Neill

Chalky soil is a challenging medium for gardeners - it takes a certain talent to make things grow in it. Enid Bagnold’s play, written in the mid-fifties, just as theatre was undergoing a convulsion of change, comes up as fresh as a daisy in Michael Grandage’s beautifully calibrated production. Bagnold’s real-life horticultural experience on the Sussex coast gave her the setting and the metaphor for this still lively, perceptive and witty, well-made play.

Headstrong, clever 16-year-old Laurel, given to making bonfires and screaming, is damaged by her father’s death and her mother’s remarriage. She lives with her acerbic grandmother, Mrs St Maugham, who is not as tough as she seems and remains in thrall to the dying butler lodged upstairs. The manservant Maitland (a harried Jamie Glover), once imprisoned as a conscientious objector, attempts to hold this odd household together. Enter Miss Madrigal, a woman who has a secret but who knows how to make a chalk garden grow. She tends and reorders the lives of her employer and Laurel - whose mother wants her back - like the reluctant flowers in the sea mist which curls just beyond Peter McKintosh’s elaborate conservatory set.

If Bagnold’s play, a study in English eccentricity, is sometimes a little too pleased with its own wit, it deals unsentimentally with love, ageing, fear of death and the necessity of compromise. And it provides glorious parts for women here played with nothing short of brilliance. Young Felicity Jones perfectly inhabits naughty, vulnerable Laurel, Penelope Wilton gets to the heart of complex, self-contained Miss Madrigal while Margaret Tyzack plays Mrs St Maugham with exquisite subtlety, brio and spot-on timing. An acting masterclass.