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Such was the association of ITV's showcase drama strand in the early '60s
with grim social realism that it earned the unkind nickname 'Armpit Theatre'. It
might seem a surprise, then, to discover in a late 1961 Armchair Theatre a
comedy of suburban horticultural rivalry - the kind of subject sometimes assumed
to have been buried by the 'Angry Young Man' theatrical avalanche of the late
1950s. In fact, Armchair Theatre was never as relentlessly 'kitchen sink' as it
is often remembered, and 'The Trouble With Our Ivy' is far from a conventional
comedy of manners.
The play charts the climax of a three-year feud between champion rose-growers
the Tremblows and the similarly green-fingered Chards, which apparently began
when the Chards' only daughter, Ivy, met an untimely end on the 'up-line'
passing by the neighbours' adjoining gardens. The Chards blame the Tremblows,
whose own daughter, Rose, broke Ivy's heart by stealing away her fiancé. The
Chards' plan of revenge is ruthless - they have stolen a rare type of
super-fast-growing ivy, an 'Amazonian creeper' from Kew Gardens and carefully
timed its planting to coincide with an approaching tropical storm to accelerate
its growth. The ivy, they hope, will succeed where their previous plot (an
orchestrated greenfly attack) failed, and destroy their neighbours' beloved rose
garden - even if it brings a similar destruction upon themselves.
But behind the personal feud lies a more familiar dispute, one of class
differences. The Tremblows are representatives of a supremely self-satisfied
suburban middle-class, utterly preoccupied with their own comfort and the
sterile beauty of their Betty Uprichards, and indifferent to their neighbours'
suffering, which they cruelly attribute to Ivy's misplaced aspirations.
David Perry's two-act play followed shortly after another florally-themed
Armchair Theatre entry, Alun Owen's 'The Rose Affair' (tx. 8/10/1961), with
which it shares its director, Charles Jarrott. Perry's play also shares
something of Owen's fantastical ambition, but, unlike Owen's, it had been
written for the stage; the playwright's own adaptation for television retained
both Gretchen Franklin and Dandy Nichols from the original production.
Jarrott's direction makes a good fist of reconfiguring the drama for the
television screen, with the Chards' demonic glee at their neighbours' mounting
panic highlighted in distorting close-ups and expressionistic camera angles. But
the play's abandonment of familiar TV realism irritated many contemporary
critics, especially the absurdist ending, which transforms both Chards and
Tremblows into howling monkeys in an ever-expanding jungle of
vines.
Mark Duguid
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1. A garden bulging with beauty (3:59)
