Rippon Lea Is Idyllic For The Perambulatory Play
The Age
Wednesday January 12, 1994
An Indian Summer (Rippon Lea) IF THERE is a natural theatre setting more atmospheric than the Royal Botanic Gardens where `A Midsummer Night's Dream' is playing, it must be the gardens of historic Rippon Lea.
Two years ago one of Melbourne's more innovative theatre groups, Performing Arts Projects, staged Julia Britton's `Loving Friends' there. Anyone who saw that production will know what to expect from this, its sequel. It is very much the same formula as before, with the same playwright and director, the same fictitious setting _ Lady Ottoline Morrell's grand Oxfordshire home, Garsington _ and many of the same characters.
Monday night's opening saw the gardens at their idyllic best. It was warm and balmy, and the white sulphur-crested cockatoos who provide a shrill obbligato accompaniment to the action were in top form.
As previously, the play is done as a tour round Garsington in the company of an amiable guide with the voice and manner of a fairground spruiker. As well as keeping his party moving, he also doubles as narrator, filling in the historical background and commenting on the characters.
They are a fascinating set: poets, painters, novelists, dancers, and one economist, Maynard Keynes, all of them free and easy in their sexual relationships. History knows them as the Bloomsbury set. For years Lady Ottoline played patron to them, extending the hospitality of her grand house.
This time Aldous Huxley and his Belgian wife Maria are among Lady Ottoline's house guests. So is Lytton Strachey, the biographer; three painters, including Vanessa Bell; a putative psychologist; and two characters from the earlier production, the choreographer Leonide Massine and his prima ballerina, Lydia Lopokova.
The action begins outside the front entrance of the house and moves from there to the stables, the orchard, the lake, the lawns, the croquet gardens, the swimming pool, and finally, as the evening light fades, the lawns at the rear of the house itself. At each stop small dramas are played out. In the stables, Strachey _ a seedy, desiccated character _ looks on lasciviously as a young man models for the bisexual painter Duncan Grant. In the orchard Maria Huxley plans revenge against her husband, who is besotted with socialite Nancy Cunard. At the edge of the lake two couples row past calmly while the painter Dora Carrington worries whether a woman can be in love with two men at once, and whether marriage to military hero Ralph Partridge might not put an end to her career.
Finally, on the lawns, everyone assembles to recite limericks, to speculate on their futures, and to sing `Auld Lang Syne', this being Lady Ottoline's last party before selling up and going to live in London.
The character-drawing is slight, but the production itself is strong on stylishness. The director, Robert Chuter, has kept a tight rein on his actors, not allowing them to slip into campery or caricature. The performances are sharp and individualised. If I had to pick out one, it would be Don Munro's lascivious Lytton Strachey.
In a conventional theatre setting `An Indian Summer' would probably seem thin. But in the garden surrounds of Rippon Lea it works like a charm. Take a sweater and a folding chair, apply Aerogard liberally to face and arms as protection against the midges, and let the environs and the actors do the rest.
© 1994 The Age
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