The Wind in the Willows

Director's Notes by Mr Anthony

The Wind in the Willows, written by Kenneth Grahame in 1908, is one of those literary classics (like The Wizard of Oz, Alice or, now, The Lord of the Rings) for which the aesthetic potency of illustration and adaptation has somewhat eclipsed the musty old book-bound words themselves – which is why many more people claim to have read these novels than actually have.

I have never read The Wind in the Willows but, as long as I can remember, I have got the gist. A combination of the 1996 Pythonesque film adaptation directed by Terry Jones (starring Jones as Mr. Toad, Eric Idle as Rat, and a lovely turn from Victoria Wood as, of course, The Tea Lady), the charming illustrations of E. H. Shepard (an addition to the 1933 reprint, from the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh, which have become the blueprint for stage and film designers for nearly a century) and this, Bennett’s masterful 1990 stage adaptation for the National Theatre, have meant that one is so familiar with these anthropomorphized riverbank capers that one can blithely lie about having read the original with no qualms whatsoever (something, incidentally, that the recent BBC adaptation has finally allowed me to do about War and Peace).

There are those who counsel adaptation is always diminishment, a warning that rings particularly loudly when it comes to beloved children’s books: "It will never live up to the original.” This is a foolish thing to say as all reading is adaptation; the context of reception is always individual and we will all edit character and location as indiscriminately and selfishly as the best artists and scriptwriters, particularly if we are ten years old and the dialogue is already being sieved through the Am Dram pretentions of a kindly grandparent at bedtime (one colleague wryly informed me she was sceptical about watching any adaptation of the book as, originally, her dad had 'done all the voices'… suffice to say this was not the long lost daughter of Kenneth Grahame).

For what these riverbank residents share with the inhabitants of the One Hundred Acre Wood or Alice’s Wonderland, is that they are the children not of their original author, but of countless adaptations and interpretations; their identities have become so fragmented, so multiple, that we must now enter into a cultural conspiracy of pretence to amalgamate each as a single entity. This is not to say key character traits have not withstood the evolution, but the colour of their owner’s blood is more richly kaleidoscopic than the book’s original, and thus adaptation could be argued as the main reason for their sterling survival.

For the version you will see next week, the heritage of illustration has been placed at the forefront of the design approach and the continued adaptation of the stage space with the surprise of pop-up elements to suit the needs of each scene is, I hope, a nod to the concept of ongoing interpretation. Bennett’s scripts often appear to be written for a vague hybrid of film and theatre and thus present a designer with an unusually large range of locations and swift changes of scene. When commissioning The Wind in the Willows the play’s first director, Nicholas Hytner, expressly requested a script that made full use of the Olivier Theatre’s technical facilities and drum revolve. For a designer on a more limited budget, the appearance of rowing boats, barges, trains, a horse-pulled gypsy caravan and a motorcar crashing into a pond (not to mention a cast of well over thirty named characters) can appear somewhat daunting and I must thank my design team for their unflagging creativity and resourcefulness over the last few months.

One of the strengths of Bennett’s version is its ability to charm a younger audience with a wistful depiction of male friendships forged in adversity, whilst offering twenty first century adults a sly deconstruction of aspects of Edwardian masculinity. For whilst Grahame may have claimed that his novel was 'clean of the clash of sex', Bennett’s adaptation contains decidedly gay undertones. Toad is a plainclothes pantomime Dame: a shrill, self-aggrandizing, corpulent flirt who winks at the mirror and the audience in equal measure (and who even succumb to drag, with feigned reluctance, in the play’s second act). Ratty and Badger are defensively misogynist ‘confirmed bachelors’ who fawn and bicker over the ingénue Mole in a haughty display of barely suppressed jealousies. The female characters are predominantly sexless grotesques and when Rat and Mole experiment with a heterosexual peck on the cheek from the play’s only ‘comely lass’ (the gaoler’s daughter) in the final scene, the transformation is unconvincing: even Rat sardonically observes, 'I don’t think it’s Badger’s sort of thing at all'.

Furthermore, like so much of Bennett’s work, The Wind in the Willows is a piquant study in the absurdities of the English class system. Rat and Badger display some of the worst characteristics of the mid-century middle classes: embarrassed by the unapologetic imprudence of the upper classes (Toad) and fearful of the crude ambitions of the lower (the loutish weasels of The Wild Wood), they value doctrine and systematized leisure above the unpredictability of pastures new. They are closeted, closed-minded, curtain-twitching imperialists and their riverbank is not the place of bohemian bonhomie it purports to be; it is Pony Club on a Saturday morning – a wholesome outdoorsy front for an exercise in caustic social snobbery to rival Jane Austen at her archest. Bennett has said that the atmosphere of Grahame’s freshwater community was too 'serene' and he sought to make his characters prey to more complicated feelings; who would have thought that future generations would thus add ‘bitchy’ to the suite of adjectives originally ascribed to Grahame’s animals.

And yet the inflexible self-assurance, the narrowness of taste that Badger, Rat and, to a lesser extent, Mole exhibit is so childlike (so ultimately victimless) that it renders them incorrigibly loveable. They are hypocrites too: they chastise Toad for his idleness, his whimsy and his selfishness, but this from a rat who spends his days drifting upstream eating cress sandwiches (the most fey of fillings) whilst composing bad poetry, and from a badger who can barely find the energy to change out of his dressing gown, unless it is to indulge in boyish fantasies of military glory. But the characters in The Wind in the Willows are not so much animals as children (at various stages of adolescence), and so we do not blame them for having no sense of tomorrow, no guilt for yesterday; they live in an eternal present of play. The inhabitants of the One Hundred Acre Wood are often learning, often extracting a moral, but Toad never learns from his mistakes; he bounces back and is always forgiven. Maybe that is why we love him and why he endures as a cultural emblem: because his innocence is delightfully and impossibly eternal.