Decolonizing The Secret Garden : (Play)ing with the Past

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s pastoral allegory of childhood growth and the nurturing powers of an English landscape has inspired multiple filmic and theatrical interpretations since its publication in 1911. Yet Burnett’s novel is not simply a Rousseauistic parable. Set in a gothic mansion engulfed by the past, the frequent references to ‘Magic’ (black and white) and the colonial world that Mary inhabits in India that continues to haunt the story even as it relocates to Yorkshire, all complicate this reading. These complications are not smoothed over but foregrounded by a new theatrical production at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. In this play, the intersection of class, gender, and race that inflects Burnett’s original story is revised and reinterpreted for a multi-cultural, twenty-first-century audience. While some filmic interpretations of the past fifty years have shied away from tackling the more problematic Victorian/Edwardian assumptions encoded in the novel, this Regent’s Park’s production embraces them, paying particular attention to the novel’s imperial legacy. Mary Lennox’s ethnicity is reimagined as mixed-race Anglo-Indian: she is the orphaned daughter of an Indian woman and her husband, a British officer of the Raj. Where the ghostly portrait of Colin’s mother hovers in the gothic Misselthwaite Manor of the novel, in the production, it is the inclusion of a new female character – Mary and Colin’s Indian aunt who arrives in England towards the end of the story, vocal in her anti-imperialist rhetoric – that ensures that this play plays consciously with the ghostly resurgence of empire, both for Mary and the audience. Yet, the play does more than attend to modern sensibilities. It asks questions of the Victorians/Edwardians and us, its audience: can the transportation of a colonial text preserve the heart of its source – in this case, the regenerative powers of an English garden – and dramatise the uncomfortable truths of a colonial legacy successfully? When we ‘play’ the Victorians and Edwardians, how does our contemporary culture affect the reimagination of the past we revive and revise?