I trekked across country for Sunday lunch under the apple trees in Buckinghamshire, hosted by Harry Briggs and attended by a host of lovelies. Let me tell you it was vaut le voyage. I think if you were able to distill the essence of the English countryside as you would imagine it in your most nostalgic fantasies, you might conjure up a vision of Blackwell Farm, lost in a verdant valley with a babbling river running through it. Rare wild orchids are hidden in the copses, and a giant ancient oak is hollowed for a hobbit. The delightfully rambling half-timbered brick house, embowered in classic English gardens, is a perfect set for Miss Marple’s sleuthing. It was great fun to set out armed with trug and secateurs into **Annabel Briggs’**s gardens to trim vast mauve clematis and old English and French roses for the picnic table. And then the bucolic adventures continued as I set off for Bath for Vogue for a glorious story that will be revealed in the fullness of time. . . . High on Englishness I went to the Theatre Royal for **Stephen Unwin’**s production of The Winslow Boy, starring Timothy West, of the improbably animated eyebrows. Sir Peter Hall is responsible for the theater’s repertory. His son **Edward Hall’**s company, Propeller, you will remember, was responsible for the raunchy cross-dressing Merchant of Venice at BAM . . . but his father stays on less controversial territory, and as I spend a lot of time in this part of England I live for the Noël Coward revivals that are a staple of English provincial repertory. What a great and gripping play this is, and the ensemble did, as they say, a lovely job. Terrence Rattigan is so underrated, and God knows I’d rather have his tortured English good manners and repressions than all that tawdry kitchen-sink drama that swept his antebellum style aside in the fifties and now seems even more antique. The eighties restoration of the Theater Royal, incidentally, was a pet project of Jeremy Fry, the chocolate king, and Lord Snowdon, and was decorated by **Princess Margaret’**s friend the theater designer Carl Toms in the prettiest possible manner—as one would expect from someone who worked with the great Oliver Messel (Snowdon’s uncle and a truly sublime designer). I remember back in the day that Mario Testino jumped from a helicopter to raise funds for the theater’s beautification. Wildly impressive and such a good cause.
An English Weekend: Part Two
