Cast

Everything in the Garden is far from roses in the Giles Cooper’s satirical send up of sixties suburbia.  Twenty plus years on, the black comedy is dated but it deserves a revival and no- one can leave the Palace Theatre without feeling touched by the larger than life exposure of hypocrisy and double standards.

The play focuses on a comfortable well-to-do couple, Jenny (Paula Wilcox) and Bernard (Jonathan Newth) Acton whose “cosy little corner of the world” is so uptight about appearances that real disaster threatens both their relationship and existence as they face a shortage of cash. Jealousy and envy start to gnaw, pretence becomes reality.  Bernard cannot possibly allow his wife, however idle and bored with an only child away at school, to go out to work. Her protestations, that she feels not so much a person, more a belonging, carry no weight, and arguments, as the partnership sinks even further into pretence, are taken no further.  Jenny finds her own solution amidst moral scruples sacrificed on the altar of materialism, and copes.  Bernard suffers, but is “converted” by the prospect of a glossy lawnmower and the fact that everybody else is “doing it”. The final stages are outrageous, incredulous and at times funny.  But the satire is dated and not quite sharp enough to cut through the time gap.

Paula Wilcox makes the most of the bored suburban housewife, who finds her own way of giving a hand with the family finance and the Jonathan Newth draws an excellent picture of her “respectable” conforming commuter husband.  But to shine in the eighties, this sixties comedy needed a little more polish in patches from director Brian Stirner.