The state of the British garden: Mike Bartlett’s Albion and its Chekhovian scions

Abstract

Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017) is a highly sophisticated and illuminating instance of the diversity and complexity of adaptation. Although declaring no explicit relationship to informing source texts, amongst myriad intertextual allusions Albion manifests an engagement with Chekhov’s drama that abundantly affords adaptation’s pleasures. As well as deploying the principal hallmarks and strategies of Chekhovian dramaturgy, Bartlett reconfigures in Brexit Britain scenarios, characters and relationships from The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. Moreover, demonstrating the thoroughness with which the English have appropriated and naturalized Chekhov, Bartlett implicitly challenges cardinal assumptions of that domestic tradition, through his nuanced subversion of both the ‘country-house’ and ‘state-of-the-nation’ play. Consequently, he reveals adaptation as a richly dialogic process, in which source and adapted texts shed light on each other. The politics of dramatic form(s) and of cultural adaptation and appropriation, to which Bartlett’s revision of a preeminent part of English dramatic heritage points, deftly parallel, and function as an analogue for, the conservative heritage enterprise that Albion portrays. Highlighting the longstanding association of the countryside and landscape with English cultural identity, the protagonist’s project of restoring an historic country garden to its former grandeur is laden with especial significance at this contemporary moment of national crisis.