{PDF EPUB} the Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold the Chalk Garden

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold The Chalk Garden. The chalk garden which totally defeats Mrs St Maugham's attempts to cultivate it is symbolic of her failure with her daughter and her granddaughter. Then Miss Madrigal, a hired companion, takes charge. 'We eavesdrop on a group of thoroughbred minds, expressing themselves in speech of an exquisite candour, building ornamental bridges of metaphor, tiptoeing across frail causeways of simile, and vaulting over gorges impassable to the rational soul.' Kenneth Tynan, Observer. Synopsis. Eccentric Mrs St Maugham has engaged the enigmatic Miss Madrigal to be governess to her granddaughter at her country manor house in Sussex in the 1950s. The house has a garden with a difficult chalky soil. Equally difficult to manage is the girl, a precocious liar who fabricates salacious stories about her childhood. The household is mystified by the congenial Miss Madrigal who is later revealed as a murderess who has served fifteen years in prison. She sees a lot of herself in the disruptive girl and finally persuades her to give up fantasising and return to her mother, whom she despises. Now alone, Mrs St. Maugham asks the governess to stay on with her, and although still curious about her crime, she accepts her offer to help make the chalk garden flourish. The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold. Kilmardinny Arts Centre, Bearsden. On Thursday 20th, Friday 21st and Saturday 22nd November 2003 at 7.30 pm Tickets: ?6 or ?4 concession. Available from: Kilmardinny Arts Centre (0141 931 5083), J H C Suttie, Bearsden and Milngavie Book Shop K. Findell (0141 942 2614). The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold was first produced in New York in 1955 with Gladys Cooper and Siobhan McKenna in the main parts and costumes by Cecil Beaton. It then opened to critical acclaim in April 1956 in the West End with a fabulous cast: Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Dame Edith Evans, Felix Aylmer and directed by Sir John Gielgud! It then received the ?Hollywood? treatment in 1964 with Dame Edith Evans, Deborah Kerr, Hayley Mills and John Mills in the lead roles. The play concerns an upper middle class dysfunctional family where the lonely, ageing grandmother is looking after her wild, uncontrollable and excitable teenage grandchild, a dying butler and an unresponsive garden, with assistance only from an inexperienced but willing man servant. Murky pasts and intrigue abound especially with the arrival of a mysterious new companion for the grandchild. Two other visitors bring their own revelations and problems. There is the child's mother who is re-married, re-located, estranged from her own mother and between whom tensions run high; and an old gentleman friend of the lady of the house, the judge. Over all this sits the unseen presence of Pinkbell, the former butler from the grand house in London. Though dying in a bed upstairs he is still attempting to run the life of the whole house and its occupants and cultivate the garden. His nurse completes the picture and we have a wistful yet witty story of a chaotic household surrounded by failing relationships and an unforgiving garden. About the author. Enid Bagnold (1889 - 1981) Enid Bagnold was born in Rochester in Kent the daughter of an officer in the Royal Engineers and educated in both England and Switzerland after spending time as a child in Jamaica, West Indies. She started to attend the Walter Sickert school of Art in London but when war broke out in 1914 she joined the Voluntary Aid detachment and served as a nurse at a military hospital in Woolwich. She wrote a critical pamphlet about her experiences and was dismissed; she then volunteered as a driver and served in France. After the war she worked as a journalist for Hearth and House and The Modern Society when she met Frank Harris the editor and became involved romantically with him. But she married Sir Roderick Jones in 1920 (chairman of Reuters for 25 years) and began to write seriously; her most successful book being National Velvet. There were other books as well as plays including The Chalk Garden which played at the Theatre Royal in Brighton in 1956 with Edith Evans, and Peggy Ashcroft. The "Garden" of the play was inspired by her own garden at North End House in Rottingdean. Enid Bagnold died in Rottingdean in 1981 and is buried in the family vault in St. Margaret's Churchyard. The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold. A troubled teenage girl lives with her eccentric grandmother, Mrs. St. Maugham, in a big house in Sussex, with a Chalk Garden. When a new governess is hired, partly to keep Laurel’s mother from taking her back, the brittle calm of the household is shaken. Miss Madrigal has no past, and no references; but when Mrs. St Maugham’s old friend the Judge comes to lunch, secrets are revealed and illusions destroyed. Enid Bagnold’s 1955 play deals with issues that are as relevant now as they were in the 50’s, renewing and rebuilding lives, and above all the need for love, and the need to move on. It was first performed on Broadway, in 1955. It opened in London in 1956 with Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, and was the most successful play that year, eclipsing both “Look Back in Anger” and “The Deep Blue Sea”. It won numerous awards in Britain and on Broadway, including rave reviews from Kenneth Tynan. It has been revived regularly. There was a run at the Donmar Theatre in 2008, with Margaret Tyzack (her last play) Penelope Wilton and Felicity Jones in her breakthrough role, and it is running at Chichester this year with Penelope Keith. It was also filmed in 1964 starring Edith Evans, Deborah Carr, Hayley Mills and John Mills. The Chalk Garden. I have never much warmed to Enid Bagnold's play: what others call its high comic style sounds to me arch, precious and exhibitionist. But, if this 1956 Haymarket hit is to be revived, I cannot imagine a snappier or more sensitively acted version than that by Michael Grandage. Bagnold's plot revolves around a mysterious stranger, Miss Madrigal, employed by a high-born military widow, Mrs St Maugham, as governess to her self-dramatising granddaughter, Laurel. The outer action concerns the gradual revelation (confirmed when a judge comes to lunch) that Miss Madrigal once stood trial for murder. But the inner action deals with the governess's attempt to rescue her teenage charge from her grandmother: the lying Laurel can no more flourish in this world of licensed eccentricity, than rhododendrons can prosper in Mrs St Maugham's arid chalk garden. Bagnold's play strenuously tries to have it both ways. It implicitly condemns a world of post-Edwardian snobbery; yet it delights in Mrs St Maugham's sub-Wildean epigrams such as "power and privilege make selfish people but gay ones". By a miracle of acting, Margaret Tyzack manages to reconcile one to this arthritic ogre - by making it clear that she is trapped inside a self-created persona. Tyzack sails through the play like a stately warship firing on all and sundry. But under the tart, dismissive putdowns - such as asking her daughter "How can you wear beige, with your skin that colour?" - Tyzack shows that Mrs St Maugham is a sad, solitary relic as much in need of rescuing as her grand-daughter. Grandage's discovery of a sub-textual emotional truth is confirmed by Penelope Wilton's equally mesmerising performance as Miss Madrigal. First seen silently sitting in a darkened conservatory, Wilton presents us with a woman wreathed in loneliness who has acquired an inner strength through her survival of an unjust murder-charge. Far from being mousy or self-deprecating, Wilton robustly defies her employer, and is astonishing in a scene where Laurel seeks to probe her guilty past: smiling serenely, she tells her teenage inquisitor "you take my breath away" in a tone of impenetrable irony. Wilton, in short, plays Miss Madrigal as a tough cookie who, through her self-awareness becomes a positive force for good. Clifford Rose lends the supposedly omnipotent judge a dithering vulnerability, and Jamie Glover invests a crime-obsessed manservant with a fine neurotic flakiness. But this is typical of a production that takes a play once dubbed "the last drawing-room comedy", and discovers, beneath its ostentatious phrase-making, an unexpected humanity. Upstairs, downstairs. E nid Bagnold began life as a rebel, and ended it as the lady of the manor. She moved from Chelsea and Bohemia to the butler and the garden trug. Virginia Woolf described her as "a scallywag who married a very rich man", which seems to sum up her dilemma in a nutshell - but perhaps too small a nutshell. She had to make shifts, Woolf said, "from self to self", and it was these uneasy transitions which inspired much of her best writing, and which provide the staccato wit of her most successful play, The Chalk Garden, about to be revived at the Donmar Theatre. She wrote on the cusp, and provoked considerable unease. Was she old-fashioned or avant-garde? It was hard to tell. Woolf was jealous of her, frightened of her, and at times contemptuous of her. She did not know how to place her, and literary history has been equally uncertain. Bagnold was, in her youth, an authentic New Woman of dash and style and speed, determined to carve out her own career as a writer. She was born in 1889 into a military family, and as a child lived for some years in Jamaica, where she enjoyed much freedom and learned to ride, a passion which was to inspire her bestselling novel, National Velvet, published in 1935 - a book which Woolf suspected was "meretricious", and which was not representative of the rest of Bagnold's oeuvre.

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