Why playwrights adore the country house
Moira Buffini explains how her new work builds on a long, complex dramatic tradition
The houses trap people, showing us the human tragedy of their lives
Plays such as ‘The Mousetrap’ prove we love big houses to give us a scare
Our mum would sometimes take us to Tatton Park, a stately home near the small town where we lived in Cheshire. She’d set up a picnic and we’d run over lawns, through rose gardens and round the extravagant fountains. We’d jump over the “no entry” signs and play until we were exhausted.
The British landscape is peppered with these time-traps: moated castles, creaking Tudor manses, neo-classical chocolate boxes, turrets, towers and domes. They are treasure stores of art and artefacts, evoking a lost elegance. How can we not be seduced, sipping afternoon tea by the coach house as we watch dragonflies over the carp pond? But much as I enjoy the aesthetic of our manors, I feel a sense of unease when I visit them, a sense of not belonging, a sense of the muffled lives down the back stairs. There’s something stifling about them, too.
Manor houses currently occupy a difficult place in our national consciousness. They have recently been awakened after several decades to find themselves at the centre of a storm. Are they simply treasures that should be celebrated? Or should they be recognised as products of class oppression? I began to wonder whether one of these old houses might be fertile ground for a play. Was there anything new to say in such a place, or would I be swamped by the weight of the past?
Our dramatic canon has as many manor houses as our countryside. From the Shakespearean world of Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor onwards, we find ourselves in a privileged domestic landscape of masters, mistresses and their servants. We meet obnoxious neighbours and uninvited guests. Manor houses work wonderfully as the settings for comedies. For centuries, they have been places where harmony triumphs, where order is gently shaken and then restored. In Oliver Goldsmith’s joyful She Stoops to Conquer (1773), the comedy centres around two young men who mistake a manor house for an inn. There is something honest about the eccentric life of this house, away from the artificial world of London, that leads these men to find love and self-knowledge.
The manor house comedy can show the rot in society, too. In A Woman of No Importance (1893), Oscar Wilde points a finger at the brutality and hypocrisy of a system that rewards a corrupt and powerful patriarch. Comedy can be subversive, and there is a plea in Wilde’s play for justice and moral truth.
But the manor house really comes into its own, dramatically, as a place where we explore the dark side of life. In Arden of Faversham (1592, author unknown), a domestic murder is plotted, executed and uncovered. This minor Elizabethan drama is the forerunner of our favourite kind of manor house play. We love to see people being shot, poisoned, stabbed and hit over the head with lead piping.
The game Cluedo was invented by Anthony Pratt, a musician who played the piano for hugely popular “murder weekends”, where groups of privileged friends would get together in their country houses and investigate grisly fictional crimes. The game was released after the Second World War, when the popularity of the whodunit was at its height. The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie (1952) involves a disparate group of people who are stranded in Monkswell Manor by a snowstorm. We see their mistrust and fear grow and when one of them is murdered, events reach a pitch of hysteria until the murderer is revealed and we can go home safe to our beds.
But at around the same time that manor houses were giving vicarious thrills to eager theatregoers, they were also providing a political microcosm. Nobody did this more successfully than JB Priestley. What elevates his work such as Dangerous Corner (1932) and Time and the Conways (1937) is that the houses themselves feel like omnipresent characters. They are places where time doesn’t behave itself, where humans are seen playing out small dramas, unable to see beyond their own flaws and the stifling circumstances of their lives. The houses trap people, showing us their complacency as well as the human tragedy of their lives.
Peter Barnes’s scathing satire The Ruling Class (1968) is almost like a swansong to the political manor house play, written at a time when the houses were in decline, and social revolution was the order of the day. A psychotic Earl believes himself to be Jesus Christ. His family are appalled because the preachings of Jesus are socialist. They despair at his generosity until his madness takes a different turn and he believes himself to be Jack the Ripper.
His relatives are comfortable with this, as they feel that Jack the Ripper behaves exactly as a member of the English aristocracy would.
With the notable exception of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia (1993), which occupies a liminal space between one century and another, exploring both past and present, the manor house has all but vanished from the stage. Its presence has only recently been felt in ghost stories and heritage pieces.
When I sat down to write a play, wanting to explore the anguish I am feeling about the climate catastrophe and political extremism, the manor house felt like a natural setting. I embraced all the clichés. I found I could be playful with them. Using an old device of Agatha Christie’s, I have stranded a disparate group of Britons in a decrepit manor, during a storm.
These houses are like anchors, both in our landscape and in the dramatic canon. They confront us with our past. And when our society, through the double shocks of Brexit and Covid, feels as if it’s changing faster than we can keep up with, the ancient, creaking manor house makes an unexpectedly effective arena. It allows comedy, tragedy, murder, politics and the supernatural. Who lives there now? How can we remake those old archetypes? Who are the neighbours and the uninvited guests? And who are the ghosts that haunt the draughty halls?