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Gardens in drama — like forests in fairy tales or woods in Shakespeare — are rarely just physical locations. Take the back yard in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, where Joe Keller’s sins come back to haunt him, the overgrown paradise in Mike Bartlett’s state-of-the-nation play Albion, the charming cottage shrubbery in George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession where hard truths tumble out amid the roses — or even Chekhov’s cherry orchard.
So it proves too with Danny James King’s tender new play Miss Myrtle’s Garden. It’s confined to a little patch of land in Peckham, south London, recreated on the Bush Theatre stage by Khadija Raza’s grassy circular set fringed with real flowers and shrubs. But this modest space becomes a highly charged, near mystical arena where characters struggle to belong or to move on, to hold tight or to let go. And for Miss Myrtle herself, an 82-year-old Jamaican-British lady of redoubtable character and a tongue so sharp it could slice through thistles, it is an antechamber to death, where those passing through include her deceased husband Melrose (played with quiet dignity by Mensah Bediako).
“This garden seems to operate on its own time,” says her Irish neighbour, Eddie, at one point. The same could be said of Myrtle, for whom past and present are blurring. Both her garden and her mind are overshadowed by secrets, spirits and the spectre of dementia, which plunges her into sudden pools of confusion and sharp changes of mood — much to the consternation of Eddie and of her grandson Rudy and his boyfriend Jason. King’s script is very funny, but also compassionate: we soon care deeply for this proud, complex, scared woman, played with biting wit and moving vulnerability by Diveen Henry.
It’s a measure of King’s writing and of this sensitive production from incoming artistic director Taio Lawson that we feel too the dilemmas of the other characters gathered amid the foliage. There is lovely, precise work from Michael Ahomka-Lindsay as Rudy, painfully torn between concern over his grandmother’s deterioration and a pressing desire to find out more about his father, and between his love for Jason and his anxieties about coming out either to Myrtle or at his workplace. Elander Moore deftly expresses Jason’s conflicted feelings — understanding flecked with frustration at this enforced secrecy.
Hard-drinking Irishman Eddie starts out too close to caricature, but he gradually opens out until it’s clear how much he is affected by his own grief and loneliness. Particularly poignant in Gary Lilburn’s performance is the way he quietly accepts Myrtle confusing him for her husband. It’s a play about kindness, as much as anything. There are a few too many loose ends, and Lawson’s staging is overburdened by the abrupt switches of light and sound that signify Myrtle’s flashes of terrifying disorientation, but it’s a truthful and immensely touching piece of work. It bodes well for Lawson’s time as artistic director at the Bush.
★★★★☆
To July 12, bushtheatre.co.uk
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