The Times, 5 September 1991, by Benedict Nightingale.
"Shallow plot fails to flourish"
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Adam was a gardener, Minerva, Chichester 

Louise Page subtitles her new play "an evocative love affair 
between the past and the present," and means it pretty 
literally. There are moments when it looks as if one main 
character, a sexually frustrated 18th-century landscape 
gardener, will fall passionately into the roses with the 
other, a flummoxed single parent of our own era. Talk about 
prickly chronological and thorny dramatic problems. But the 
only congress that occurs is verbal. He talks earnestly 
about his responsibility to the future, and she as earnestly 
about her duty to the past. 

Much discussion on the same subject, most of it equally 
earnest, is to be heard on Paul Farnsworth's dual-period 
set. In the first half, there are minuscule box hedges on 
the edges of a rectangular lawn. In the second, they are 
replaced by tiny rose-trees and rather larger statues of 
Adam and Eve. This is the formal garden that Simon 
Dormandy's solemn Richard Stephens spends 1791 trying to 
make more natural, and Sharon Maughan's bright Annie Daviot 
attempts in 1991 to recreate according to the notebooks he 
left at his death. "I am making it for you," he tells her. 
"I am keeping faith with you," she says. And so on, and so 
on. 

Page is an intelligent dramatist, with an inquiring, subtle 
mind; but she has chosen a theme hard to adapt to the 
theatre. Recognising this, she does her best to interest us 
in the family circumstances of her protagonists. Annie, it 
emerges, was an advertising executive who lost her husband 
and her job, had a nervous breakdown, and has now returned 
to nature with her bolshie son. She spends much of the 
evening bickering with him and arguing more seriously with 
her rich brother, whose plans for the antique garden are 
less traditionalist than her own. 

But her woes are nothing beside Stephens's. He has to face, 
not only a nervous patron, but a wife who has lost too many 
babies in childbirth to allow him near her. The only sort of 
beds he finds particularly welcoming are ones with flowers 
in them. For him, vegetable nature seems easier to handle 
than its human counterpart, and the future more managable 
than the present. Annie feels rather the same way about the 
past. Such contradictions, judiciously presented, are 
somewhere at the heart of Page's play. 

But the heart tends to tick rather than beat. It is, on the 
whole, not a very powerful, resounding organ. There is 
little wrong with Caroline Sharman's direction, or with her 
cast, which also includes Petra Markham as the distracted 
18th-century wife, Alexis Denisof as the smooth 20th-century 
brother, and Geoffrey Freshwater as a doughty gardener with 
boots and a jacket for each epoch. But everybody has trouble 
animating some exchanges. 

"I am here now," "But you are dreaming of the future," "I 
have nowhere else to live" ... "You know me too well, 
Richard," "Sometimes I don't think I know you at all" ... 
"My husband is like a tide: he must move on." Should not a 
play so concerned with gardens be a bit, well, earthier? 



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