Wyndham gives a more scientific explanation in The Day of the Triffids (Michael Joseph, 1951) for how the ambulatory plant got its name, stressing that this was no incidental weed but the result of human meddling with nature. And in a television interview he described how the formative image of a lethal ‘vegetable’ emerged from a twilight walk down a country lane where he felt that the branches overhead ‘might come over and strike down, or if they had stings, sting at one, and the whole thing eventually grew out of that. The moving vegetable would be a real menace.’

The Day of the Triffids made Wyndham’s name and established him as the successor to H. G. Wells, but it was the culmination of many years of uncertainty and frustrated literary ambition. Born in 1903 near Edgbaston to parents who separated when he was eight, Wyndham did not enjoy a happy childhood until he was sent to Bedales in the village of Steep, Hampshire. The school might have been spartan but its relatively liberal nature, unorthodoxy and sense of fellowship, even its pastoral setting, were things that affected Wyndham for the rest of his life. If, from the apocalyptic ruins of novels such as Triffids and The Kraken Wakes (Michael Joseph, 1953), there emerge the outlines of a different and more egalitarian community, they have echoes of Wyndham’s teenage years in the South Downs.

In the words of his biographer Amy Binns (Hidden Wyndham, Grace Judson Press, 2019), Wyndham ‘left school to an uncertain future typical of Bedales graduates’. He toyed with various careers, including farming and advertising, before fixing on full-time writing. For years he contributed sci-fi short stories to American pulp magazines like Amazing Stories writing as John Benyon Harris, his birth name (Wyndham had a suite of middle names from which to pick pseudonyms). It’s a mark of his modest and faintly unconventional nature that he spent thirty years living frugally at the Penn Club in Tavistock Terrace, and later in Bedford Place, in the heart of Bloomsbury. He began a devoted and lifelong relationship with Grace Wilson, another Penn resident and an independent-minded English teacher. For many years they were unable to marry because Grace would have lost her job had they done so; that, together with the unhappy experience of his parents, almost certainly contributed to Wyndham’s ambivalence toward traditional social structures. During World War II he worked as a censor for the Ministry of Information at Senate House, which becomes in The Day of the Triffids a gathering place for those who are still sighted after a blinding, worldwide meteor shower. Later, Wyndham enlisted and served as a cipher operator in the Royal Corps of Signals, arriving in France soon after D-Day.

The post-war period produced more short stories and false starts in other directions, including a detective novel, until Wyndham sent an early version of Triffids to Frederick Pohl in New York. Pohl was a fellow science-fiction writer but, more to the point, also a literary agent. After extensive revisions Pohl sold the story to Collier’s for serialisation for $12,500. This was a life-changing sum, the equivalent of many times the average annual wage in Britain. For British publication Wyndham approached Robert Lusty, a connection from the Penn Club and deputy chair of Michael Joseph, saying in characteristically tentative fashion that he was looking for advice as he didn’t think the story was right for the publisher. Lusty disagreed, the book was published and John Wyndham never looked back.

Fig. 1: The dust-jacket front cover of the first edition of The Day of the Triffids, designed by Patrick Gierth.

The Day of the Triffids was issued as a mainstream novel, with an enticing cover by the illustrator Patrick Gierth depicting a couple of triffids prowling round Piccadilly Circus, empty except for a few small, flailing human figures. (In the same year Gierth produced another memorable cover for Geoffrey Household’s A Rough Shoot, also published by Joseph.) The cover shows something terrible and inexplicable happening in a very familiar setting, and this contrast became the template for several in the sequence of highly successful novels which followed the publication of Triffids.

After years of roaming in space for his pulp magazine yarns, Wyndham had come back down to earth and found his authentic literary self. His real interest was not in interplanetary voyages or scientific gizmos but in the way people and society reacted under extreme stress. As a firewatcher on the roof of the Penn Club during the Blitz, Wyndham had glimpses of destruction that he would later incorporate into his fiction; similarly, walking the streets revealed not only the resilience but the darker side of the wartime capital, the looting and assaults, handy material for a dystopian vision. It wasn’t all gloom, though. If the events that unfolded in Wyndham’s novels were appalling, they were also in some curious way appealing. The notion of a clean slate, of restarting society, or some slimmed-down version of it, can have a peculiar resonance. Wyndham’s central characters tend to be no-nonsense, practical males accompanied by women who are also no-nonsense, etc. In other words, they are well qualified to survive, and perhaps to thrive.

There could even be a picturesque, slightly surreal quality to these fresh worlds, as in The Kraken Wakes (Michael Joseph, 1953) where alien invaders, dwelling at the bottom of the sea, precipitate the melting of the polar ice caps. Low-lying land is inundated. From a vantage point in the National Gallery, the narrator watches the water lapping round Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square and wonders what Nelson would make of his new view.

Wyndham shifted his ground with The Chrysalids (Michael Joseph, 1955), set in Labrador in the distant future and envisaging a fundamentalist, post-apocalyptic community in which any deviation from the physical norm in humans or animals is considered a ‘blasphemy’ to be punished by death or exile. The nature of the apocalypse or ‘Tribulation’ is never made clear but is probably nuclear war, a spectre which haunts much of Wyndham’s work. A group of children develop telepathic powers – a punishable mutation – but eventually break free of their stultifying society. Often cited as the strongest of Wyndham’s novels, it was well received, no doubt helped by the pleasing artwork on the jacket of the UK first edition (by illustrator Brian Wildsmith) depicting a footprint in the sand. Closer examination reveals the foot to have six toes.

Fig. 2: The front cover of the Penguin 1979 reprint of The Chrysalids.

The best of John Wyndham’s later books was The Midwich Cuckoos (Michael Joseph, 1957) in which all the inhabitants of an archetypal Wiltshire village fall into a trance during which the women of childbearing age are apparently impregnated by aliens. The children who emerge nine months later are strangely similar to each other though worryingly different from their mothers. They have golden eyes and blonde hair. They display a kind of ‘hive mind’, something which was always of interest to the author, but unlike the youngsters using telepathy in The Chrysalids, these intruders on the English pastoral scene have a more sinister side to them, capable for example of causing a car driver who has injured one of them to have a fatal accident. In other hands, the traditional tropes of science-fiction such as alien invasion, possession and manipulation are simply outlandish or even ludicrous, but Wyndham had the knack of grounding his stories in the everyday world even as that everyday world was being wrenched apart.

The Midwich Cuckoos was an immediate success, reprinting within weeks, and in 1960 was filmed as Village of the Damned, starring George Sanders. The most successful of Wyndham’s screen adaptations, it is now rightly regarded as a cult classic. One of the notions lurking behind these two books featuring gifted if odd youngsters is that we scarcely have need of interplanetary visitors since they, the children, might already be the aliens among us. It’s no coincidence that Wyndham’s novels appeared in the mid-1950s just as the adult world was becoming aware of, and agitated by, the rise of a distinct teenage culture.

Now buoyed by substantial royalties and working at a slower rate, Wyndham produced two more novels before his death following a heart attack in 1969. Trouble With Lichen (Michael Joseph, 1960) dramatises the discovery of an anti-ageing drug extracted from an obscure lichen. As the title suggests, this isn’t an undiluted benefit, and Wyndham shows the sharply diVerent reactions of the two biochemist discoverers, one male, one female. In line with the approving attitude elsewhere in his fiction towards strong, decisive women, more weight is given to the female protagonist of Trouble With Lichen than to the man.

In Chocky (Michael Joseph, 1969) he returned to the theme of the possessed child but this time on a smaller scale. The parents of 12-year-old Matthew notice that the boy has an unusually active and persistent ‘imaginary friend’ with whom he has frequent conversations. After running through possible explanations, including mental illness, it turns out that Chocky is a benevolent presence, a ‘scout’ from a distant universe lodging inside the child’s mind, here to learn about and perhaps to guide humanity. A child is chosen as being more malleable than an adult. The grand and catastrophic strands of Wyndham’s classic fiction are here replaced by something homelier. Margaret Atwood, a long-time admirer of the author, notes in her afterword to a recent edition: ‘Wyndham keeps the novel’s tone light: Chocky is close to a domestic comedy, much like E.T., a film I’m guessing may have been partly inspired by it’ (NYRB Classics, 2015).

Indeed there is a Spielbergian quality, avant la lettre, to Wyndham’s later fiction, with its focus on childhood and its intermittent optimism. It is perhaps the thread of hopefulness running through almost all his work which caused Brian Aldiss to refer disparagingly to him as a ‘cosy catastrophist’. The adjective is misplaced, however. Wyndham was capable of truly disquieting visions, as in the novella Consider Her Ways, first published in an anthology Sometime, Never (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956). Wyndham’s story envisages a society in which men have become extinct and a few select women are able to reproduce artificially. Sometimes interpreted as a rather grim feminist parable, Consider Her Ways fulfils one of the functions of speculative fiction, to make the reader think as much about the present as the future.

Like many of Wyndham’s readers and admirers, I first came across him in my early teens, pleased to find something ‘modern’ after Journey to the Centre of the Earth or The Time Machine. Indeed, I remember thinking – this was not long after the beginning of the 1960s – that all the discussion about the need for new social arrangements, and particularly sexual ones, in the utterly changed world of The Day of the Triffids was a bit daring. My collection consists mostly of Penguins from that era, but I have two Michael Joseph firsts, acquired a few years ago at Blackwell’s and from the library of John Baxter. Neither Trouble With Lichen or Chocky has the cachet or the collectibility of the really desirable quartet from Wyndham’s first burst of success and were more modestly priced at £75 and £50 respectively.

Courtesy of Blackwell’s Rare Books, current figures for that famous quartet put Triffids in the region of £1,200 and upwards (though signed copies can go for £11,000 or more), while both The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos are available for around £750 and The Chrysalids for £600. My copy of Lichen has doubled in value so it may be that Wyndham’s more substantial books are also on a rising curve. I hope so because I think his novels are worth collecting both as exemplary science fiction and, though this may sound paradoxical, as very characteristic products of the 1950s and early 60s.

The other two contributors to Sometime, Never, the novella collection previously mentioned, were William Golding and Mervyn Peake. At the time, Wyndham would have been the most familiar name, with three best-selling novels under his belt (Lord of the Flies had appeared only two years before). Now, nearly three quarters of a century later, Wyndham remains enduringly popular, the majority of his books never out of print and his visions of the future still influential. Alex Garland, the screenwriter of 28 Days Later (2002), has acknowledged the influence of The Day of the Triffids on the film. Both begin with a man waking up in hospital and discovering a London landscape which has suffered a terrible transformation. But I think that the placing of him alongside Golding and Peake, despite being an accident of anthology as it were, tells us something of significance. With his sometimes-askew imagination, his willingness to explore daunting areas and his very English sensibility, John Wyndham has an honourable place in that high literary company.

With thanks to The Book Collector, Spring 2026 edition.

*****

Wagner’s monumental cycle of operas has always provoked controversy. Recent productions have moved away from the composer’s own naturalistic stage directions and the visual interpretations of nineteenth century artists such as Arthur Rackham, Odilon Redon or Carl Emil Doepler, who designed the costumes for the first production of the tetralogy at Bayreuth in 1876. After the Second World War, particularly in a divided Germany, there were pressures to rethink Wagnerian interpretation, to move beyond myth and symbolism, heroic violence and racial pride, to more pressing and immediate political and economic themes. Two years ago, at the Berlin Staatsoper, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s direction lurched implausibly between a corporate boardroom and a mental hospital. The Valkyries were in track suits and the rest of the characters looked like they had been kitted out in Primark. The conductor was Phillippe Jourdain, the orchestra and singers first rate. But most members of the audience were left in some confusion as to precisely what was going on.

By way of contrast, the current production at La Scala conducted by Simone Young and directed and designed by Sir David McVicar, takes the Ring back to its mythic roots while making brilliant use of the 21st century potential of inventive and versatile light effects to indicate setting and mood. Sumptuous costumes by Emma Kingsbury are clearly influenced by the interpretations of the above-mentioned artists while hinting at the early twentieth-century fashions of Mario Fortuny as well as more recent inspirations such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Game of Thrones. The whole production is infused with a vibrant athleticism which verges at time on the acrobatic.  Not only do the Rhine Maidens appear to be actually swimming, but they are joined by a mysterious naked man (a Rhine boy?) whose astonishing but inexplicable gyrations are one of the few anomalies in an otherwise harmonious vision.  Beautiful quasi-human horses prance on running blades, while the giants Fasolt (Jong Min Park) and Fafner (Ain Anger) must surely have created operatic history by performing their demanding roles on stilts.

Suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite to enjoying these operas and one of the difficulties for any director/designer must be the need to link the many different, parallel worlds.  In this vast opera house, it is crucial to play at several levels so that the actor singers are more than dots on a flat surface.  McVicar and his co-designer, Hannah Postlethwaite, achieve this by strewing the area of action with huge rocks shaped like broken human heads and hands.  These become caves, mountains, the dragon’s lair, Brünnhilde’s resting place. It is as if an age of giants has gone before and we are left with their shattered memorials, a perpetual reminder of the inevitable decline and ephemerality of all civilisations.

Simone Young’s conducting is passionate and energetic, her gestures large yet precise and there is a powerful sense of forward motion. She has an apparently instinctive feeling for the great sweep of the score, and Wagner’s music never drags as it can do in more ponderous versions. The effect is at once lush and exciting, verging on the wild, different from the more polished sound of the Staatsoper orchestra under Phillippe Jourdain in Berlin. Young started her Wagner career as assistant to Barenboim in Bayreuth and clearly lives and breathes these operas. The cast, orchestra, and audience love her. There was a touching moment in the first interval to Die Walküre when the first clarinet was invited onstage to rapturous applause to recognize his final performance after 40 years in the band.

But in the limited time available (I am on holiday in Naples as I write), my focus will be the final work of the cycle, Götterdämmerung. At the start of the opera, we find ourselves in yet another parallel world, the home of the Norns who, like the classical Fates, must weave the rope of past, present and future.  In their horror of what is to come, their rope unravels and falls apart.  Then, after Siegfried’s poignant farewell to Brünnhilde, we arrive in the kingdom of the Gibichings. The stage is illuminated with gold, a vast gilded skull looming behind the action from the back.  Is this the slayed dragon from Siegfried? Is all this gold the looted treasure from Fafner’s cave? And yet the mood here is distinctly human and horribly familiar. The Gibichungs are a fierce, militaristic clan, their uniforms hinting at Prussian bellicosity and the early days of European fascism.

From this point on the opera moves fast with a fatal love potion and plot twists worthy of any contemporary thriller. Through all this rapid action, Klaus Florian Vogt’s powerful Siegfried gains a new emotional stature. He has left behind the angry adolescent and grown into his destiny as the great hero. Vogt has the power and vocal agility the role requires and there is never a hint of exhaustion.  He is well matched by Camilla Nylund’s Brünnhilde, noble and impassioned, her initial shock and despair leading to a fury that is all too easy to comprehend. She is at her best when all movement stops and she is standing front stage, singing out to the auditorium in conventional operatic style.

The build-up to the death of Siegfried is famously rich in dramatic irony, with the audience knowing so much more than the participants.  We watch in horror as the lovers becomes victim to the nefarious machinations of Hagen (Günther Groissböck), culminating in the terrible moment when Brünnhilde tells him exactly how to kill the man she believes has betrayed her. For those who grew weary during the long explanations and extended declarations of the earlier operas, the rapid pace of Götterdämmerung comes as something of a relief, despite its dark contents.

Finally, out of the twists and turns and horror of Siegfried’s death comes a sudden shift of tempo, the heart-rending beauty of the hero’s funeral march.  Readers should look elsewhere for an analysis of this ten-minute orchestral interlude which draws in motifs not only associated with Siegfried, but also his parents Siegmund and Sieglinde. Every listener will have his or her very personal response.

In the final dramatic scene of the drama the stage shimmers with soaring red and gold flame. There are clouds of grey black smoke. This is the moment we have all been waiting for. The heroine and her loyal steed, the half-human, half-equine Grane run through the blaze to the funeral pyre, kneeling at the head and feet of the great hero as the flames rise upward. Through the inferno we see the broad staircase of Valhalla and the hooded figure of Wotan falling to his doom.  It’s hard not to feel that the composer would have approved.

The Ring is sometimes avoided by those who dislike the racism implicit in the story, the strong whiff of antisemitism in the presentation of the Nibelungs. Others will justify the philosophy of its creator by pointing out that the thirst for power and control amongst the warring races is shown to be an empty quest. No one actually uses the ring, and all those who seek to possess it are destroyed, even the Gods. The Ring is a lengthy parable about the dangers of power and in that sense, it is as relevant to the world we live in today as it was to the nineteenth century. On a more human level, it tells a familiar domestic story of forbidden love and jealousy. The current production doesn’t burden us with a specific contemporary angle on Wagner’s intentions. Rather it presents a world on stage comprised of both beauty and horror, leaving us to bring our own thoughts and reflections to this great piece of operatic writing.

Ros Carne, Naples, March 2026.

Edward Albee’s visceral four- hander is a bold choice for the first in-house production from this theatre’s Artistic Director, Mike Tweddle. The play was first performed in New York City in 1962 and while some of the writer’s preoccupations may feel particular to its place and era, the brilliant script never feels dated. It is a monumental work, far more than the portrait of a marriage in free fall, it is also an anguished plea to all of us to face the truth about ourselves.

Liz Ashcroft’s single set is, at first glance, naturalistic, a drab book-lined living room on the campus of a New England college. Within the design, a smaller proscenium arch hints at the theatricality of the world on stage. Here for more than three hours, in real time, two couples drink, play games, taunt, and torment each other, revealing their deepest fears and longings.   The dialogue is sharp, often fiery, quick repartee interspersed with painful stories that recreate past trauma and feel like a series of plays within the play.

The cast is superb. Katy Stephens, as Martha, prowls like a stalking cat, arms outstretched, wrists curled like claws, ready to pounce from the moment she announces the arrival of guests at 2am. She appears in green silk, drunk and disappointed in her life, tottering on uncomfortable shoes, horribly cruel to her husband, lurching from self-pity to wild vivacity, using her visitors as allies, growing increasingly uncontrolled and predatory until the final terrible scene where her violence turns in against herself.

Matthew Pidgeon is the perfect foil as her demoralised husband, George. At first almost immune to his wife’s constant belittling, the arrival of guests gives a focus to his passive aggression. As she grows drunker and crazier, he takes control, becoming the agent of stage action like the pretend shooting, the arrival of flowers. Despite her cries for attention, he becomes the master of ceremonies, the one to organise the brutal games and tell false tales, whatever the pain to his victims.

When the younger couple, Nick and Honey, enter the mix, the chemistry never falters. Leah Haile sparkles as the nervous campus wife, mannered, respectable, speaking in euphemisms and shocked by crude language. With time and brandy, she too unravels, bursting out in interpretative dance as if shedding a skin, needy and desperate for affection, clutching her life of pretence as a protection from loneliness.  Ben Hall as her husband Nick has an equally marked dramatic journey. Proud of his physical prowess and professional achievements, lurching from shy good manners to honest anger as he becomes the butt of his host’s vicious teasing and his hostess’ sexual predation.

An obvious thought about these young people, stopping by for a drink at 2am, is, ‘Why don’t they leave?’ But we soon realise they are caught in a trap, just as we, the audience, are caught in a trap. It’s an uncomfortable play to watch, tragic, but not a tragedy, comic, but not a comedy, naturalism verging on absurdity. It’s a comment on the American Dream, but also a comment for all time about the lies we tell ourselves and each other, a precursor of much of the great drama and cinema of the 1960s and beyond.

★★★★★    Ros Carne   25 February 2026

Masculine hypocrisy takes a witty battering in Laura Wade’s stylish adaptation of this Somerset Maugham classic. The original play, first performed in 1926, shocked London audiences with its clear-eyed vision of marriage as an economic contract.  Modern audiences are more likely to give a nod of approval to the serious message that underlines the comedy. But the play retains its power to move and disturb in its stark dramatization of sexual double standards.

Tamara Harvey’s touring production for the Royal Shakespeare Company is a feast for the eyes. Constance Middleton, determined to become financially independent of her wealthy surgeon husband, John, chooses to follow her natural talents, setting up in business with her sister as an interior designer. Her own home becomes her showroom, the imaginary and the real converging in Anna Fleischle and Cat Fuller’s elegant set and costumes.  The comfortable light-filled space is reassuring, hinting at the world of the early twentieth century well-made play. Characters glide past a transparent wall before entering the pastel themed drawing room, a perfect setting for the glorious 1920s costumes. With several nods to the 21^st century, these look as fresh as if they’d walked off our streets yesterday, even as the moody jazz piano conjures the world of the bright young things. Despite the butler, the over-sized telephone and the references to the war, this feels very much like a play for today, albeit a wealthy upper middle-class segment of today.

The show’s heart is Kara Tointon’s charismatic and lovable Constance. She is a delight to watch, graceful and vulnerable, weeping at her daughter’s departure to private boarding school, while remaining a hard-nosed realist, managing to remain cool through a year of her husband’s infidelity. Her timing is pitch perfect with some delicious dramatic moments, as when she hurls her handkerchief onto the piano to warn her mother to leave the room so she can be alone with her desirable male friend, only for her mother to misinterpret the melodramatic gesture. It’s easy to see Maugham’s debt to Wilde.

Tointon is supported by a strong cast, particularly Sara Crowe as her mother and Amy Vicary-Smith in a heightened role as her unmarried sister. The sizzling family chemistry is a delight. Gloria Onitiri adds a flash of outside excitement as Marie Louise, though her interpretation of the role of the mistress feels at times histrionic. The men, true to the script, are very much secondary players, almost wooden in contrast with the vibrant women.

Wade has made subtle changes to the original version, maintaining the comic moments and verbal acuity, while emphasising the underlying theme. Where Maugham uses consecutive time, she gives us a flashback, showing the actual infidelity, thus cutting back on the wordiness of the script. She also plays with the ending, making the main character more likable for a modern audience. It’s a tiny last-minute tweak, creating a degree of uncertainty about Constance’s future conduct. In so doing, Wade softens her brittle edge which, critic and biographers agree, may have been coloured by Maugham’s own experience of an unhappy marriage. Purists might baulk at this, but the message of the play remains. Financial independence is key, and the fight for sexual equality continues.

★★★★☆      Ros Carne     3 February 2026

With thanks to StageTalk magazine

photographer credit @ Mihaela Bodlovic

Out of interest, I wanted to see what AI could do with Anna Funder’s story of Mrs Orwell.  This is not me writing, or my writing style.  I would want to do ‘something clever’ with Wifedom, and my own Lifedom, such as Babydom that halted my Writerdom for a number of years.  Oh! And we mustn’t forget Cookingdom, Shoppingdom and Washingdom.  And Inspiredom. (My two children are kind, clever, creative – and they’ve completed their duty in leaving the nest!)  I wonder what a 2025 Husbandom would say?  “Hey! I’m walking the baby in the Pramdom and feeding from the baby Spoondom.  Yes, I can change in the Kingdom of Nappydom! I am a modern take on Daddydom, Daddydom, Daddy-Daddy-dom.”

In this ‘rhyming review’ (where I’d wanted a brilliant ballad) I have guided AI with questions and edits to its initial suggestions.  It had a habit of using the word ‘scaffold’ which I didn’t feel was right for this piece.  I also tried out other styles – Co-Pilot asked if I’d like to try a Rap, being naturally drawn to musical compositions, I did – and it was quite good.  But with each example, more was needed (as we writers find during the early process of writing for ourselves). For now, here an extract (6 of 10 stanzas) from the AI Poetic Overview.  And  it still needs editing! 

Dear Readers and Writers: Your thoughts please, such as did it entice you to read Wifedom?  Feel free to ‘have a go’ and ‘make changes’ – let me know how you get on.

In shadows she stood, while the spotlight was his,
Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a life gone amiss.
George Orwell wrote truths of the world’s disguise,
Yet her labour and love hid from history’s eyes.

Her hands shaped his pages, his drafts she refined,
The brilliance we praise was a partnership signed.
Invisible editor, silent and true,
Her effort the framework on which his words grew.

Meanwhile, and in between:

She scrubbed at the lavatory, blockages grim,
While Orwell chased muses, the world turned to him.

In Spain she was stranded, the city in flame,
Headquarters abandoned, yet she still remained.
On a mattress she sat, with the secrets below,
Passports and papers the world shouldn’t know.

Through danger she slipped, through shadows she fled,
A tale half imagined, half history read.
Her courage or fiction — the line’s hard to trace,
But Funder restores her to time and to place.

Anna Funder unearths what silence concealed,
A wife’s hidden story, at last now revealed.
Through fragments of letters, creatively art,
She restores Eileen’s place, her essential part.

So Wifedom reminds us, with rhythm and rhyme,
Unseen contributions can outlast their time.
A call to remember, to honour, to see –
The wives in the margins who shaped history.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder is published by Penguin

THE FORSYTE SAGA Parts 1 & 2 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

28 November – 10 January

What’s that line about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way? It’s certainly true of the wealthy and assured Forsytes whose conflicts and rivalries span generations, as each hands down its particular bundle of secrets and neuroses to the next.

The RSC are staging John Galsworthy’s famous saga in two parts at the Stratford Swan, with a total run-time of around five hours, and all expertly distilled by Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan from the multi-volume original. The production focuses on the experience of the women in the narrative, with the first part dedicated to Irene (Fiona Hampton), reluctant wife to Soames Forsyte (Joseph Millson) , and the second to Fleur (Flora Spencer-Longhurst), Soames’s daughter by his second wife.

The younger woman is very much of the twentieth century while Irene finds herself the victim of Victorian male attitudes. In short, Soames regards her as his possession. Status, money, respectability are all-important. A woman’s role is to adorn – and adore – her man and, of course, to provide him with a son.  Irene’s growing friendship with a young architect, an outsider like her, provokes the main crisis in the first play and indirectly its most notorious scene, the rape of Irene by her husband.

Yet Galsworthy and his adapters are too subtle to paint Soames as an out-and-out monster. Underneath the hardness and the calculation, there is a romantic streak as well as passion, and Joseph Millson conveys both the rigidity of the man and his need for love.   The contradictions extend to the entire dynasty. Though the elders of the family believe themselves to be ‘the backbone of England’ and can be condemned for their conviction that ‘everything is a commodity’, we’re reminded that commercial success is the financial underpinning for art, science and even religion. An appreciation for paintings, as both collectable and aesthetic objects, is one of the threads that run through this complex, ambivalent drama.

Things inevitably change over the the 50-year period encompassed by the two parts of The Forsyte Saga. Historical events like the Boer War or the General Strike are used as milestones. The end of the Victorian era is finely suggested by the slow lowering of the red curtains which tower over the stage in the first play while the transition between the 19th century and the 1920s is shown in the shift from (literally) buttoned-up clothing to looser, softer garments (set and costume, Anna Yates). Significantly, Soames is dressed much the same at the end – top hat, wing collar – as at the beginning.

But the new is not necessarily better than the old. At first we see Fleur as an open and innocent guide to the past. But it turns out she has her father’s blood and will batter her way through remorselessly to get what she wants. The ending is cathartic but subdued. To an extent, the events in part two are an echo of what occurs in part one, and perhaps the point is that what we can’t escape is not so much fate as it is the shaping legacy of family.

Under the direction of Josh Roche, these are elaborate productions, with a large cast and a multiplicity of scenes shifting smoothly between public and private, notably assisted by the lighting (Alex Musgrave), sound and music (Max Pappenheim). It seems appropriate that at one of the key moments in the play we hear the poignant and mysterious Tallis Fantasia by Vaughan Williams, since both the music and the drama are straining to catch some essence of Englishness, even if it will always remain out of reach.

★★★★☆      Philip Gooden     6 December 2025

Photography credit: Carn Harle

With thanks to StageTalk magazine

17 October – 15 November

The Me-Too movement has sparked a renewed interest in this problematic play. To emphasise this point a succession of notorious, powerful and exploitative men is projected above the stage at the start. But male sexual hypocrisy is not the totality of Measure for Measure. There are also considerations of the nature of sexual attraction, of nobility and leadership, of the relationship between law and equity, as well as a significant comic subplot that gives a sympathetic commentary on the economics of sex work. This latter has been cut entirely from director Emily Burns’ pared-down version, adding to the sense that what we are witnessing is somehow divorced from the context of a wider world.

The play opens with Duke Vincentio (Adam James) taking the decision to withdraw from his duties, appointing a deputy, Angelo, (Tom Mothersdale) in his place and disguising himself as a priest in order to better understand the actions and lives of his subjects.   Angelo proves to be harsh and tyrannical, condemning a young man, Claudio (Oli Higginson), to death for the crime of fornication. Claudio’s sister Isabella, (Isis Hainsworth) a novice nun, pleads for her brother’s life. Angelo agrees to a reprieve if Isabella will have sex with him. Thus, here is a story rife with tension and interest. Yet, sadly, this strangely bloodless production fails to engage the heart of the audience as it should.

The contemporary setting, reminiscent of an airport lounge, conjures a cold corporate world. It is a credible scenario, but for the play to work we need to feel the horror of Isabella’s predicament. She is portrayed as an ordinary young woman, out of her depth in her dilemma. And though Tom Mothersdale’s Angelo is a fine study in subtle wickedness, by indicating that male sexual brutality and hypocrisy is commonplace, some of the excitement and drama is lost from the famous scene when Isabella challenges his iniquity.

It’s a difficult play to bring off. The language is often tortuous and the rapid diction of some of the actors here means it is occasionally hard to follow. An exception is Oli Higginson whose outstanding Claudio has a major stage presence. In a clever variation to the bland design, a glass cage is lowered to the stage to indicate his imprisonment. Here he rails against his fate, and we get a forceful sense of his terror of death as he delivers some of the play’s greatest lines.

There are other nice touches such as Emily Benjamin’s interpretation of Mariana, previously engaged to Angelo and brought into the final trick to expose him. Her pragmatic approach to marriage as a transaction fits well into this heartless world view. And Douggie McMeekin’s Lucio beings an element of comedy to an otherwise sombre show.

So, while there have been richer and more exciting productions of the play, this one is never dull with a good pace and forward propulsion. Adam James’ Duke Vincentio is convincing  and watchable, though his character remains something of a mystery as does his motivation for relinquishing his post at the outset.

As for the ending, it always poses problems for a modern interpreter, and many choose to amend the traditional happy pairings into something more subtle. It’s not surprising, given the director’s preoccupations, that she has taken greater liberties than most and provided a major twist in the fate of the heroine.

★★★☆☆  Ros Carne, 24th September 2025

Photography credit:  Helen Murray

With thanks to StageTalk magazine

We think we know a lot about the Mitford sisters. Dramatizations of Nancy’s sparkling novels have proved hugely popular, and there have been numerous documentaries and books. But Amy Rosenthal’s meticulously researched and shocking new play had me vowing to check out the sister’s own autobiographies and letters.

The action commences in 1932 in the family’s chilly, rambling Oxfordshire home, time and location- hopping to wartime Washington DC and California, and then on to 1969 Versailles where the eldest, Nancy, lies near to death. Directed by Richard Beecham, the cast of six captures the intimate sibling chemistry, hinting at the outset at the stark personality differences which were to explode into a major private and public rift between the Fascist, Diana, the Nazi, Unity and their Communist sister, Jessica.

Kirsty Besterman plays Nancy, the writer and observer, cool, acerbic and elegant, yet endlessly loyal despite her disgust at her sisters’ politics. She is well matched by Elisabeth Dermot Walsh as the beautiful Diana, devoted to her Fascist husband, Oswald Mosley, refusing to recant from her own vile views after the war, yet capable of great personal affection. Emma Noakes plays Jessica, the lynch pin of the drama, fleeing her notorious family to become a Communist, marrying a radical New York Jew (Joe Coen) while continuing to be shadowed by her family’s virulent antisemitism. Noakes shows her over the course of 30 years as a brave pioneer, struggling with her inner demons. The youngest, Debo (Flora Spencer-Longhurst) is the happy one, simpler by nature, comfortable inside her class, marrying the Duke of Devonshire and never ceasing in her attempt to hold the family together.

But it’s the Devil who has the best tunes and there are powerful and disturbing moments featuring mad, bad Unity (Ell Potter) striding across the Oxfordshire drawing room in her black shirt, giving a Nazi salute, hurling Jessica to the floor or later, in Munich, aiming her pearl handled pistol at her own head and pulling the trigger. Yet though she becomes the more fanatical of the two arch reactionaries, it is level-headed Diana’s steady support for the Nazis that is the most chilling.

Rosenthal has taken on a huge plethora of themes and facts and managed to hone them into a working drama. As with all plays based on life, its very scope gives rise to structural problems, in particular the episodic nature of the action. The first part of the play feels jumpy and the distinctive characters of the sisters, while always credible, seem occasionally cartoonish. But any play about the Mitfords should not lack wit and humour and Rosenthal’s script has plenty of both, though those seeking debutante balls and society chit chat will be disappointed.

The drama reaches its peak in a powerfully imagined final encounter between Jessica and Diana in which Jessica confronts her elder sister with the horrors of the ideological route she has chosen. There follows the culmination of her own long struggle to escape the narrow snobbery and racism of her family and class in order to marry the man she loves.

Jessica’s love story lies at the core of this fascinating play, offering a glimmer of hope for a better world. At a time when the forces of reaction are gathering once more, both here and abroad, it’s a play with a resonance far beyond the history of one eccentric English family.

★★★★☆   Ros Carne   1 October 2025

Photography credit:  Mark Senior

With thanks to StageTalk magazine

What’s the difference between a ‘soap opera’ and a ‘continuing drama’?  Quite a lot if you’re an aficionado of Radio 4’s The Archers, the subject of a smart new play premiering at The Barn in Cirencester. The difference is never made explicit in writer Tim Stimpson’s Haywire but those referring on stage to the world’s longest-running radio drama as a ‘soap’ will be gently put right.  If anyone is entitled to write about this continuing drama it’s Stimpson, who has spent almost half his life scripting The Archers and who is plainly in love with all things Ambridge down to the last hay bale. The same can be said for the cast of this affectionate, witty and touching production.

The ingenious framework for Haywire is that radio man Jonty (James Mack) is desperate to become a producer on The Archers. Maybe writing a play called, let’s see, ‘Inventing Ambridge’, and remortgaging his house in order to hire a bunch of faintly desperate actors and renting studio time to record it will be enough to persuade the powers-that-be at the BBC to give him the gig.  All this takes place in the present day while ‘Inventing Ambridge’, the play-within-the-play, dramatises the first few years of the programme from its low-key start in 1950 to a show that could pull in an astonishing audience of 20 million listeners in 1955 for the episode in which Grace Archer dies in a barn fire. (Not coincidentally, this was broadcast on the same night that ITV was launched.)  And then, within the-play-within-the-play, we have short excerpts from those early broadcasts featuring Dan and Doris Archer, the ever tedious Phil, the luckless Grace, Walter Gabriel et al. So it’s all very meta, with characters coexisting in the present, the 1950s and the never-never time of Ambridge itself.

Each layer of the onion has its tears and resolutions. In the present day, the cast aren’t happy to discover that Jonty has splashed half his cash on hiring Abby (Olivia Bernstone) because she’s an online celebrity who’s busy monetising a break up with her boyfriend. And Martin (Anthony Glenn) has a beef with Adrian (Kieran Brown) because years ago Adrian cheated him out of the title part in some clapped-out cop drama.  Meanwhile in the 1950s the actors fret about how little they’re being paid and whether the public loves them for themselves or for the characters they play. And real-life producer Godfrey Baseley (Kieran Brown) directs his secretary to go out and buy toy farms so they can keep count of the number of sheep mentioned in the show.

If all this sounds confusing it can be at times. But the clues are there to spot: an influencer thumbing through her socials online signals we’re in 2025 while players celebrating a pay rise to £12 a week tells us it’s 1955.

An energetic and committed cast are completed by Liam Horrigan and Rosanna Miles with Geebs Marie Williams playing a sound-girl and gofer in both past and present. One of the incidental pleasures of Haywire is seeing the bizarre way in which effects are created, from the sound of a hand squelching in yoghurt to simulate lambing to the opening of an ironing board imitating the creak of a farm gate.

Above all, Haywire, under the nifty direction of Joseph O’Malley, is a love letter to the glory days of radio. Excerpts from The Goon Show or ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’, which was definitely a soap, recall a time when the wireless was central to national life. And that time is not completely lost. When the theme tune of The Archers finally arrived, there was a burst of heartfelt applause from the audience in the Barn.

★★★★☆     Philip Gooden    5th September 2025

photographers credit @ AlexTabrizi

With thanks to StageTalk