The Independent, September 6, 1991, by Paul Taylor.
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He can imagine her, he says, naked in her bath, the water 
coursing down the nape of her neck. This kind of chat-up 
line must have been tried on countless times, though seldom 
(as here) across a gap of two centuries. Billing itself as 
"an evocative love affair between the past and the present," 
"Adam Was a Gardener," the new play by Louise Page, follows 
the developing relationship between an eighteenth-century 
landscape gardener and a twentieth-century woman. 
Premonitions of her spurred him on to create the garden for 
her future pleasure. Now, as she re-creates it according to 
his original intentions, and gets to know him through his 
notebooks, the drama draws the pair of them together in a 
ghostly overlapping of present and past.

It sounds like a promising basis for a play and certainly no 
one could accuse Louise Page of lacking themes to train 
across the intricate trellis-work of the plot. Juxtaposing 
two eras enables her, for example, to highlight the ironies 
of the preservation versus progress debate. Dedicated to 
stopping the clock or turning it back, Annie (Sharon 
Maughan) winces at the idea of disabled access and litter 
bins, or even of retaining later editions like the Edwardian 
rose-garden to delight the noses of the blind. But, as 
Richard Stephens (an amalgam of Humphrey Repton and Joseph 
Banks) points out, the past glories she wants to refashion 
were themselves the result of acts of vandalism on the 
preceding past. "In the future, no one will know they are 
rowing through cherry trees," he tells his eighteenth-
century patron, as they envisage the lake he is about to 
build on the grounds which will look as though it had stood 
there from time immemorial. Presenting an image of "eternal" 
natural order, his garden is an artificial construct, one 
period's uneasy trade-off between creation and destruction.

Though it uses horticulture as a deft metaphor for the 
relationship of past and present, the play itself is about 
as lush and organic as a diagram. Everything has been pruned 
back in the writing so that the characters feature as little 
more than inert pieces in a shifting thematic pattern. It's 
no wonder that the actors in Caroline Sharman's visually 
exquisite production sound strained and hollow; the 
clunking, efficient dialogue offers them nothing to build 
on. A bare minimum of background is given even to the 
central figure of Annie. All we are told is that she is 
recuperating from a nervous breakdown and that she's left 
her job in advertising to spend more time with her little 
boy (whose bolshie truculence is splendidly conveyed by Alex 
Scott). Ms. Maughan does a brave job of trying to flesh her 
out, but it's hard to become properly involved with a 
character who has a sparse CV.

Some of the moments of out-of-time recognition are handled 
hauntingly, particularly the point when Annie, lying back in 
a boat and trailing her hand in the water of his lake, seems 
to see Richard on the shore envisioning her there two 
centuries ago. And Paul Farnsworth's beautiful design proves 
that, in a theatre, landscapes can be better evoked 
abstractly than by importing lorry-loads of genuine greenery 
(even if the rushes and the box hedges here seem to fall out 
of the ground obediently at the mere sight of a spade).

The trouble with the play is that everything fits so 
tightly, nothing has room to breathe or to enjoy a moment's 
irrelevance. Richard's wife, Mary (Petra Markham), is unable 
to bear children who survive - a childless state that 
provides too mechanical a contrast to the fructifying 
legacies he is able to leave the world through his botanical 
researches. Features such as the unearthing of earrings, or 
the little boy flashing SOS messages into outer space with 
his torch, diligently reinforce the idea of communication 
across time. The patterning is clever and adroit, but in the 
end unmoving, because the play's emotional subsoil is to 
thin.



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