I think that the most uttered line on the English stage is not “to be or not to be,” but, “I’m going into the garden.”
Whether one is seeing Noel Coward, Agatha Christie, Alan Ayckbourn or even Harold Pinter, more often than not, the set employs a posh English drawing room of some sort, with French doors leading to an off-stage garden.
Sooner or later, one of the characters announces he or she is going there, and does. Sometimes, a character in tennis togs enters from the garden, uttering the nearly as ubiquitous line, “Tennis anyone?” or “It’s the Vicar. He’s been murdered.”
One seldom sees what goes on in the garden, which can be a blessing. One night in 1990, while he was starring on Broadway with television’s Roma Downey in a revival of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Circle,” the late Rex Harrison proclaimed, “I’m going into the garden,” and then for some reason added, “to take a pee.”
He was then 82, performing his last role (he died two months after the play closed), and so may be forgiven the indiscretion.
Indiscretion of another sort is running amok in a new work by Ayckbourn on stage here that might be called the ultimate “I’m going into the garden” play.
Two plays in one
Dealing with sexual naughtiness in English country life, it is in fact called “House” and “Garden.” It was an enormous hit earlier in London and last year in Chicago, and is doing a sellout business now in New York with an all-new cast.
As those who saw it at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre will recall, it’s actually two plays in one — using the same actors and the same story, but taking place simultaneously on separate stages. “House” takes place in the house set, on the Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center Stage 1, while “Garden” is in the garden, which is performed on MTC’s City Stage II. The actors run back and forth to carry off the whole.
The theme is more or less adultery, and the high comedy and pathos that so often result.
“Ayckbourn has written nearly 60 plays and so many of them are ingeniously constructed,” said veteran English actor Daniel Gerroll, who plays the debonair but inwardly swinish toff Gavin Ryne-Mayne, an archetype of the genre. “He seems to pose himself an insuperable problem and then overcome it. And that’s where he has his fun.”
Going-into-the-garden plays are as much an ingrained part of British culture as westerns and film noir detectives are of ours. Consequently, “House” and “Garden” weren’t much of a challenge for Gerroll, who later this summer is starring in and directing Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” at the Hamptons’ Bay Street Theatre.
“Ayckbourn’s world and the sort of theater he constructs is something I was raised on,” said Gerroll.
For Jan Maxwell, who plays long-suffering heroine and wronged-woman Trish Platt, it wasn’t such a breeze. A star of Neil Simon’s recent hit “The Dinner Party,” she was asked to take over the role of the upper-class British wife just two weeks before the first preview.
“I was afraid I’d be looking like a deer in the headlights,” she said. “But I love a little challenge. I’m actually from North Dakota, and we had this little straw hat summer theater where we would do 10 different plays in eight weeks. You get this performance energy you can read as fear.”
As a British product, this genre has often succeeded in the U.S., as the popularity of “Jeeves and Wooster” and the Diana Rigg “Mystery” series on public television attest.
But it’s not one that American playwrights have done well with. Class-conscious A.R. Gurney comes to mind, but, except for “Love Letters,” he’s not had a lot of smash hits.
“Somebody once said about Gurney’s plays that they can give you a three-month run,” said Gerroll. “There is an audience for a Gurney play but it’s just enough to fill a theater for three months.”
Part of the problem is that many such works aren’t viewed as having a lot of substance.
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Beneath the surface
“I think, unfortunately, if you put someone in tennis gear and they have French windows and plummy English accents they’ll be less expectancy of anything truly moving going to happen,” Gerroll said.
For Maxwell, that certainly need not be true.
“I do think the themes are universal,” she said. “The thing about it is that you can’t come on stage and do patter, patter, patter. You have to have something going on that’s real underneath. Otherwise there’s no point in being there.”
As Trish, she plays a woman who comes to the painful realization that a marriage rendered meaningless by years of adultery is one that should be ended. Maxwell was aghast to discover how common marriages with “understandings” are in Britain.
“A mistake that a lot of actors make is that they just go, `Oh, this is funny. Let’s just ride the top of it,’ instead of going deep. When I first started to rehearse, [the director] kept saying to me, `You seem so sad. You seem so sad.’ I said, `You have to find the truth before you can cover it up. This woman hasn’t been satisfied for 17 years, and somewhere I’ve got to find that. Then I can put the veneer on top of it.'”