British empire? What British empire?

Here’s a tip for play-goers. When the curtain goes up on a garden, prepare for some feeble plotting. The glory of gardens, for the playwright, is that the characters can enter and leave without reason. The rites of welcome and valediction, the physical opening and shutting of doors, the declaration of motive are all abandoned. Anyone can wander in and out of a backyard. But that freedom of action is denied to a character who enters, say, a palace or a travel agents or a bedroom.

Shaw is fond of gardens. Ayckbourn quite likes them too. Shakespeare used them more than once (but he’s forgiven) and David Storey sets his 1970 classic Home in a garden where two elderly bores bump into each other on a warm autumn day. They seem to be acquainted. They exchange meandering chit-chat, which deepens the uncertainty about where they are. Two sexless crones appear. With pathetic brashness, they attempt to flirt with the grey old twaddlers. Someone goes stumbling off in search of a spare chair. After more unanchored witter, a bearded maniac appears and honks abuse at the ladies while twirling garden furniture over his head. They treat his behaviour as normal. At which point the penny drops. We’re in a mental asylum. The wafer-thin banter continues and the old gits start to babble about their spurious connections with royalty and their sorrow over Britain’s loss of status.

The play turns out to be a formula. Dementia, barren lust and impotent rhetoric stand for the decline of our former colonial magnificence. These days, the whole thing seems contrived, aimless and obscure and yet when the script first appeared it secured the services of Gielgud and Richardson in the lead roles.