The Pageant of Ambridge
A regular listener of the long-running compendium of rural sound effects The Archers has brought it to my attention that a current story line in the show involves the staging of a pageant at the Ambridge Village Hall. The Pageant being put on by Lynda Snell is a revival of E.M. Forster’s England’s Pleasant Land first staged at Milton Court, Surrey in July 1938.
England’s Green and Pleasant Land was Forster’s second pageant. It tells a story of the destruction of the old order of Squire George by Mr Bumble, representing new money and Jerry the Builder who throws up houses across the countryside. The pageant, whilst being a classic example of rural elegiac, also contains some pretty strong scenes including the agricultural labourers’ revolt of 1830, predicting the violent overthrow of the old order…here’s hoping. At the original Ralph Vaughan Williams conducted the band and wrote some of the incidental music.
Above: Ralph Vaughan Williams conducting England's Pleasant Land
Avid pageant-followers will have to tune in over the weeks leading up to Easter in what promises to be a notable pageant, about which on its premier almost eighty years ago, the Spectator observed: ‘Mr Forster, dramatizing the end of the old order first for the peasantry, through enclosures, then for the gentry, through death duties, each time by the agency of Bumble, the political lawyer, and to the final advantage only of Sir Jerry [the Builder], has made a play in defence of any part of England’s pleasant land which could be acted anywhere, given the setting and the talent.’[1]
Links to the episodes can be found here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b070hxsq
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0717m19
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071vkwn
[1] Manchester Guardian, 11 July 1938, 8.