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The Chalk Garden
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by Enid Bagnold
Directed by Scott Alan Evans
March 13 to 15, 2004
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
NYC
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| SYNOPSIS |
Into the eccentric English household of a domineering Grandmother, her wild-eyed granddaughter and their strange ex-con butler, comes an enigmatic governess who sets their world on its ear.
?A tantalizing, fascinating and stimulating piece of theatre.? NY Daily News
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| CAST/CREW |
Francesca Di Mauro
Miss Madrigal
Barbara Marineau
Second Applicant
Darrie Lawrence
Third Applicant
Cynthia Harris
Mrs. St.Maugham
Nicholas Kepros
The Judge
Dawn Dunlop
Production Stage Manager
David Toser
Costume Consultant & Designer
Mary Louise Geiger Lighting Designer |
| PRESS |
Backstage.com
The wit and exquisite construction of Enid Bagnold's 1955 comedy come across to a remarkable degree... [ read more]
Playbill
TACT (The Actors Company Theatre) presents a concert reading revival of Enid Bagnold's The Chalk... [ read more]
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| DRAMATURGY |
Lady Roderick Jones a.k.a. Enid Bagnold
Enid Bagnold was born in England in 1889. A daughter of an officer in the Royal Engineers, she spent her childhood in a converted coffee plantation in Jamaica. She was educated in England at the famous Huxley school, which was run by the mother of Aldous Huxley. She was ?finished? in Marburg, Germany and Lausanne, Switzerland. After a year in Paris she made her debut in Woolwich, one of the fashionable London suburbs.
A far from ordinary debutante, she became an ardent suffragette; studied painting with the famous Walter Sickert, showing her work at the New English Art Club; and counted the Georgian Poets (i.e., Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Siegfried Sassoon) among her circle of friends.
It was during World War I that Bagnold?s literary gifts were first revealed. Her journal, kept while acting as a hospital aide, so impressed Prince Emanuel Bibesco that he suggested it was worth publishing. Diary Without Dates was the result and brought her both literary recognition and dismissal from the hospital for ?breach of discipline.?
At the age of 30, she married Sir Roderick Jones, owner and managing director of Reuters News Agency. As Lady Roderick Jones, she and her husband lived in a 21-room estate in Rottingdean, England.
Americans first came to know her for her novel ?Serena Blandish,? a best-seller published in 1924, which was adapted into a highly successful play by S.N. Berhman. National Velvet, the novel that followed in 1935, was another huge success and has the distinction, of course, of introducing Elizabeth Taylor to the silver screen in the movie version.
Bagnold wrote her first play at the age of 53. Lottie Dundass (1942) premiered in the United States before it was presented in London the following year. The same scenario was followed with her next, and perhaps most well known play, The Chalk Garden. Written in 1953, the play was brought to New York by Irene Selznick. After out-of-town tryouts in New Haven and Boston, the production opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on October 26, 1955. Originally directed by George Cukor, he was replaced by Albert Marre before the Broadway opening. The cast included Gladys Cooper as Mrs. St. Maugham, the Irish newcomer, Siobhan McKenna as Miss Madrigal (brought over from London to do the role), Marian Seldes as Olivia, and Fritz Weaver, as Maitland. Cecil Beaton did the sets and costumes. It closed in March, 1956, after running a total of 182 performances. The play was nominated for a Tony award for Best Play; Gladys Cooper and Siobhan McKenna were nominated for Best Actress, Fritz Weaver for Best Featured Actor, and Albert Marre for Best Director. It won in no category, but Mr. Weaver did win the Theatre World Award for his performance.
John Chapman in New York Daily News called it a ?tantalizing, fascinating and stimulating piece of theatre ? an adroit, literate piece of craftsmanship?
Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times hailed it as ?a drama of quality? with ?witty lines popping off at tangents, non-sequiturs rambling brightly through the dialogue, everything more or less upside down, nothing leading directly into the next point of the story.? And he called it ?an unyielding comedy by a witty writer with a highly personal style.?
Walter Kerr in New York Herald Tribune said of it: ?It is as though Miss Bagnold had wanted to dramatize what one of her characters calls ?the shape and shadow of life, with the accidents of truth taken out.?? And yet, he goes to say, ?out of all that is circuitous and eccentric and delightfully left-field, something very real is communicated.?
Robert Coleman in The Daily Mirror felt that in the play ?Miss Bagnold weighs illusion and truth, evasion and the factual. She does so with humor and warmth, with understanding and compassion.? All of which he found to be ?provocative and stimulating.?
?We eavesdrop on a group of thoroughbred minds, expressing themselves in speech of an exquisite candor, building ornamental bridges of metaphor, tiptoeing across frail causeways of simile, and vaulting over gorges impassable to the rational soul.? Kenneth Tynan, observed in the Observer.
Ms. Bagnolds other plays include The Chinese Prime Minister (1964), and a Matter of Gravity (1975). She died in 1981 at the age of 91.
THE CHALK GARDEN
There is a section of England where the ground is chalk. Chalk soils are identified not so much by the soil itself as the inclusion of large quantities of pieces of chalk or limestone (calcium carbonate) which makes the soil very alkaline. You probably won't be able to dig down very far in them before you come to a layer of more rocks than soil. Their over-riding characteristic is their alkalinity meaning that you can't grow plants that thrive in highly acidic soils.
Both Enid Bagnold and the original set designer, Cecil Beaton, had homes in this area of England. In the original production, it was important to both Ms. Bagnold and Mr. Beaton that only flowers which actually grow under such soil conditions be used in the stage design. The flowers were specially made for the production in London by artificial flower expert, Hugh Skillen - under the supervision of Bagnold and Beaton, of course.
CHALK LOVING PLANTS:
Onion Flower
Solomon Seal
Candidum
Madonna Lilies
Nelle Moser clematis
Lamb?s lug
Sweet Geranium
Lovelies-bleeding
Sweet William
Foxglove
Lily Auratum
Lily Erinum
Panda Forna Plant
Maidenhair fern |
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