The Chalk Garden was first produced at the Haymarket in the very same year as Osborne's kitchen-sink drama Look Back in Anger came out at the Royal Court. Enid Bagnold's play has been called 'the last of the drawing-room comedies', yet reviewers of its recent revival at the Donmar Warehouse are talking about it as if it combined the poetic anarchy of Joe Orton and Harold Pinter with the polished wit of Oscar Wilde. Certainly the Donmar production is beautifully directed and acted, but is all this eulogising just the sort of over-reaction that happens when something that has totally gone out of fashion is resuccitated and proves surprisingly good?
       The set is an elongated room, with faded rugs, sofas and little tables, clearly belonging to someone who can afford to overlook the new and fashionable in favour of rundown aristocratic cosiness. Upstairs, and in fact never seen but often heard of, is the ancient retired butler Pinkbell. He, in an almost-Pinteresque reversal of convention, sets the rules for the household. The 70 year-old Mrs St Maugham, imperious as she is (a brilliantly grand but unhappy Margaret Tyzack) always defers to him, as do her otherwise-obstreporous granddaughter (a sometimes irritating but also enchanting Felicity Jones), and the temperamental manservant (Jamie Glover). It is the advent of a new governess, sad, distracted Miss Madrigal (superbly acted by Penelope Wilton), who upsets the power balance, and nurtures the garden of the manor house and its inhabitants to a greater sense of life and truth. As in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, the garden metaphor, with its ambivalences about cultivation and artificiality opposing (and melding with) naturalness, is central.
       There is sometimes a sense of contrivedness in the play. What its author called her 'plums' - semi-Wildean riffs and aphorisms - were pruned away by Irene Selznick at the time, but the remaining ones still seem a little stilted, if enjoyably so. There are also implausible parts of the plot, such as how exactly the governess reforms her charge in two months, and the coincedence of a figure from Madrigal's past turning up in the house. But what really seems odd and unbelievable (and this is in the script and no reflection on Felicity Jones) is the character of Laurel, the granddaughter. Nowadays she'd hardly count as an enfant terrible, more as a rather well-behaved, though occasionally neurotic, adolescent, with an unexpected, and pleasing, penchant for the intellectual and artistic. Her eccentricity and wildness, like those of the other characters, belong to an era when nonconformity was both essential and safe for anyone of spirit in rich or intellectual circles, rather like Elizabeth Bennett getting her skirts muddy in Regency society. It is this self-congratulatory overturning of conventions, by people who can afford to do so, at a time when it was necessary to do so, that ultimately makes The Chalk Garden seem dated.
Jane O'Grady