Daily Telegraph, September 10, 1991, by Charles Spencer
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Louise Page's new play, "Adam was a Gardener," puts me in 
mind of my own feeble attempts at horticulture on a small 
London roof-terrace. Strolling around the garden centre in 
the spring, one imagines a riot of colour and luxuriant 
growth lasting right through the summer. But geraniums 
wither, the roses are blighted with alarming fungal growths, 
leaves turn yellow and drop from their stalks. The planning 
is far more satisfying than the reality.

There is no doubt that Miss Page's play, now receiving its 
premiere at Chichester's Minerva Studio, has a grand and 
original vision. It is set in an English landscape garden 
and spans 200 years, from the 18th century to the present 
day. But for all its bright ideas, the play somehow fails to 
take root in the imagination, and the characters never 
blossom into full life.

Annie Daviot is a single parent emerging from a nervous 
breakdown. She is employed by her brother to restore the 
18th-century garden of a country house, and, as the play 
develops, she finds herself becoming increasingly fascinated 
by the character and ideals of Richard Stephens, who laid 
out the grounds two centuries earlier.

The narrative switches back and forth across the years, and 
the play becomes both a love-story and a ghost-story. Annie 
finally meets Richard, who tells her that he planned the 
garden for her. But there is a curious lack of wonder about 
these encounters across time, and Miss Page is infuriatingly 
elusive about whether they are really taking place or simply 
happening in the imagination of her characters. A good ghost 
story needs a firm foundation in humdrum logic if it is to 
raise the hairs on the back of the neck.

Just occasionally Miss Page's imagination takes flight, and 
there's a glimpse of the glory that might have been. The 
portrait of Richard Stephens' marriage to a devoted wife who 
won't let him make love to her because she has lost so many 
children in infancy is both powerful and painful.

And the play fascinatingly contrasts the attitudes of the 
18th and the 20th centuries. Two hundred years ago, Miss 
Page suggests, there was a spirit of confidence and optimism 
which allowed the destruction of one garden in order that a 
better one might be built for the future. Today we lack such 
faith and retreat instead into the painstaking re-creation 
of the past.

Yet even these themes are presented with a certain plodding 
predictability in Caroline Sharman's far from green-fingered 
production. It is surely a mistake in a play about gardening 
and growth to have a set featuring such depressingly 
artificial plants, and much of the acting is equally stiff 
and lifeless, though Sharon Maughan, on temporary release 
from those ghastly Gold Blend coffee commercials, gives 
touching performance as Annie.

But for all its evident intelligence, long stretches of the 
play offer about as much dramatic excitement as a prolonged 
bout of weeding in the herbaceous border.



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