Word: bagnold
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most works with any real distinction possessed foreign blood. The season's most creative new play was British Writer Enid Bagnold's witty, elegantly savage The Chalk Garden. Even more finely tempered was Tiger at the Gates, Jean Giraudoux's humanely ironic lament for the Trojan and all subsequent wars. Audiences might argue whether Samuel Beckett's puzzling, plotless Waiting for Godot was profound art or a mere philosophic quiz show; less arguable was the neatness of its writing, the desolation of its mood. In Lillian Hellman's sharp adaptation, Jean Anouilh...
...Chalk Garden (by Enid Bagnold) is one of those rare plays that are genuinely and fascinatingly individual. When the curtain rises on a Cecil Beaton drawing room in Sussex, nothing could look more conventional. Even when the characters seem less in a comedy of manners than a comedy of mannerisms, Playwright Bagnold could still be having fairly usual fun with her eccentrics. But soon enough there is evidence of a special mind and temperament at work, of a kind of grande-dame method of playwriting, wayward and unconciliatory, but with a wit that delights and an authority that mesmerizes...
Inhabiting Playwright Bagnold's Sussex manor house are a self-indulgent, irresponsible dowager who exerts a Lady Macbeth manner on trifles, her adolescent granddaughter who indulges in mischief and fabricates melodrama, a rather Shavian manservant who cannot bear being criticized, and upstairs, dying, a butler who for 40 years has ruled the household. Into it, as a companion for the granddaughter, comes a primly dressed woman with a superb and transforming knowledge of gardens, a gift for ingratiating herself with people, and an obviously beclouded past. How beclouded is made clear when a judge (Percy Waram...
Despite all the chalk, there is no lecture at the blackboard. There are a few too many whiffs of symbolism, but Playwright Bagnold is neither mystical nor didactic. Instead, after the fashion of all true high-comedy writing, something simply becomes the more touching for having seemed brittle, the more penetrating for having seemed fagade-like. The paper chase of upper-class antics and insolences does lead to the human heart; among so many blank-cartridged witticisms there are one or two real bullets...
Playwright Bagnold's sidelong, elegantly savage play fortunately gets the production it altogether requires. Gladys Cooper as the booming, inwardly empty dowager and Siobhan McKenna as the quiet, inwardly burning companion create a brilliant contrast and head a talented cast. Though doing justice to the play's darker moments, the cast keeps it throughout an engrossing entertainment...