Reuters link in hit play revival

Shortly after Sir Roderick Jones resigned ignominiously from Reuters in 1941, his novelist wife, Enid Bagnold, author of National Velvet, embarked on a career as a playwright.

Lottie Dundass premiered in Santa Barbara, California then Brighton. Poor Judas and Gertie followed.

Jones, chairman and managing director of Reuters, was forced out over a secret deal for British government subsidies which compromised Reuters’ integrity and which he concealed from the Board.

Driven by a passionate desire to hear her own witty dialogue spoken on stage by the finest actors of the day, as well as a new need for income in the wake of Jones’s departure, in 1952 Bagnold started work on what became her most successful play, The Chalk Garden. This deeply autobiographical work is currently enjoying its first major revival for 30 years at The Donmar Warehouse, London and stars Penelope Wilton as Miss Madrigal and Margaret Tyzack as Mrs St Maugham.

Aspects of Enid can be seen in all the female characters while Jones’s imperious nature is reflected in the dying butler, who never appears on stage but whose domination of the household is strongly felt. The play improves with age and has had brilliant five star reviews.

Bagnold was described earlier this month in The Sunday Times as “the link between Wilde and Coward and Frayn and Ayckbourn”.

In 1956, when the play opened at the Haymarket with Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, Kenneth Tynan wrote “The Chalk Garden may well be the finest artificial comedy to have flowed from an English (as opposed to an Irish) pen since the death of Congreve”. 

It is a limited run and seats are selling fast.

Anne Sebba, former Reuters correspondent, is the author of Enid Bagnold A Life. Copies (£9.99) available from her at anne@annesebba.com. ■