Theatre Royal Plymouth

What is to be done with an important country house its owner can no longer support? Should Dorothy Stacpoole sell up? ‘Release all your wonderful treasures on to the open market and they are there for everyone to enjoy. It’s a kind of emancipation, a setting free to range the world ... a saleroom here, an exhibition there; art Lady Stacpoole, is a rover.’ Or should she donate it to the National Trust who will open the doors to the public. ‘What is the worst thing in the world? Other people,’ observes the auctioneer. ‘People Spoil things.’ Besides ‘The Trust is concerned with people ... access, in one word, sharing. We ask the question: why should one share? After all, nobody really believes in sharing. We do it if we have to but if one is in the fortunate position of being able to keep things to oneself why share?’ The Trust would also need an endowment.

Then they will publicise and make much of the idiosyncrasies of the house, making it earn its living. Here there are William Kent and Robert Adam rooms, Henry VIII’s rosary, Charles I’s shirt and the Chippendale furniture. They will be fussed and cared for but, as Dorothy says, ‘they’ve survived because nobody did care. If they’d cared they’d have been sold years ago. I take them for granted. Not caring is what’s preserved them.’ (p.19) ‘Nowadays,’ as the NT adviser tells her, ‘the scullery and the still room are as important as the drawing room.’ Perhaps Dorothy has another means of thwarting the Trust before her house its consumed by its awfulness.

It’s farcical, funny, at times far too silly but in the end sad but it isn’t fair about the National Trust despite reservations about its commercialism. Bennett himself is terribly conflicted as his introduction makes clear. ‘The state has never frightened me. Why should it? It gave me my education (and in those days it was a gift); it saved my father’s life as it has on occasions saved mine by services we are now told have to be paid for.’ The National Trust in its ethos is like those great public services – sharing (and we must) gardens, country parks and houses full of delights and precious things, awful old tat and sublime rarities. But perhaps I wasn’t the best reader as I volunteer in a country house rejected twice by the National Trust. The rewards, as Bennett itemises, are tea, flapjacks and company. Well, yes but I get to read books in a gallery or drawing room hung with lovely pictures and only speak to visitors when they want answers and company too.