Cover

The Potting Shed

A Play

Graham Greene

The Potting Shed

produced by Carmen Capalbo and Stanley Chase, with scenery by Chester Rakeman Scenic Studios, was first presented on Tuesday, January 29, 1957, at the Bijou Theatre, New York. The cast was as follows:

Act One

Act One
SCENE ONE

It is the living room of Wild Grove one autumn afternoon—if one were to describe the room in terms of its owner, H. C. Callifer, a high-minded rather pedantic room and a little outmoded. There are a lot of books, but they look, even from a distance, dull and heavy books. One might have taken them for works of theology if one were unaware of H. C. Callifer’s reputation. Alas! how much of the world, after a period when Callifer was classed with Wynwood Read and The Cosmic Fallacy with The Martyrdom of Man, has become unaware of that reputation. The world has changed around this room, this house. When Callifer first built Wild Grove, planning it with the woman he loved, those factory chimneys which now appear in the distance through the garden window did not exist. There was a grove—perhaps there was even a wildness in Callifer himself, but more than forty years have passed since then. The Grove has become a grave, and in the best bedroom upstairs H. C. Callifer is dying. Throughout the scene that follows, till the very end, we hear at times the footsteps of those above; conversations are interrupted while the quality of the footsteps are, as it were, assessed.

When the curtain rises there is only one occupant of the living room—a man twenty years junior to Callifer himself, but twenty years at this period of life have ceased to count. Dr. Frederick Baston is now well past sixty, though he was once Callifer’s youngest and cleverest disciple. His reputation grew with Callifer’s, but he was never a rival. If Callifer had died at sixty, Baston would have written his biography and carried on his work, but when the tide of the world’s favour receded from Callifer, it receded from Baston too. They are part of the same beach. Will any publisher now be sufficiently interested to commission a biography?

A small, tired, fussy figure, worrying too much about details, Baston is walking restlessly from one end of the living room to the other, from the fireplace with Dutch tiles to the mirror over the sofa. He carries two or three sheets of notepaper in his hand and he is learning something by heart. As he reaches the fireplace he tries out a passage, letting his hand fall.