EVERGREEN PLAY IS BACK
Sometimes a reviewer comes up with a pithy quote that's just too good to pass up.
And as Giles Shenton admits, when The Guardian described Old Herbaceous as ‘Downton Abbey with gardening tips’ they hit the nail on the head.
The one-man play was written by former Upstairs Downstairs head scriptwriter Alfred Shaughnessy in 1979. The Kick In The Head company revived it in 2016 and it’s been going strong ever since. Giles has been playing the country house head gardener, Herbert Pinnegar, for the duration.
‘We’re booking now through until December 2020,’ says Giles. ‘It’s been quite amazing.’
And Giles has become rather attached to the part.
‘He’s become quite an old friend actually, the trouble is he keeps creeping
into everyday life when he’s not meant to,’ he chuckles. ‘He’s a bit of a dear old soul, so I don’t mind too much. Alfred Shaughnessy’s widow came and saw it a couple of weeks ago when we were down in Devon, which was lovely. That’s the first time she’d seen it done since it was originally performed back in the ‘80s. She’s delighted that Herbert is going around spreading his pearls of wisdom again.’
The play is the humorous and poignant story of the singleminded gardener and his unrequited love for the owner of the house, Mrs Charteris.
‘Herbert’s life is about being in a garden and that’s his work for life, but his story as a human being, I think, touches a lot of nerves with a lot of people.
‘He’s quite a simple chap – he’s uncomplicated, he’s devoted the whole of his life to the same thing, as a lot of people do, and they don’t get brilliantly rewarded for it. A lot of people recognise that.' He also puts a large part of its success down to the relationship between Herbert and Mrs Charteris. ‘He definitely has feelings for her and he knows nothing can ever happen because of the social divide. And one of the things that happens towards the end when she starts to become forgetful and he visits her in a home and she doesn’t even recognise him, a lot of people have been through that with family members to one degree or another.’ This performance as part of Weald & Downland’s summer of culture is due to take place outdoors. ‘The premise is that the audience has wandered into his little potting shed and because they’ve wandered in he starts chatting to them. It’s an old country house, and like many of those places do now, they open their houses and the gardens to the public to make some money. Herbert’s quite used to people popping in, and he tells them his life story.’