The 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...
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