Tales from the Theatrical Woods: Chapter 18
21 September 2017
We have yet to be notified officially, but I hear we have been successful in our bid to gain planning consent for the Lavatorium Rotundum – another first for the Green Belt. Everything else has been pushed aside to secure the convenience and comfort of our opera guests. The unsightly, cramped, inaccessible and malodorous mobile toilets at West Horsley Place have been consigned to history. Next season, hidden discretely in the adjacent woods, will be a spanking new brick-built, turf-roofed, doughnut-shaped, 40s fitted-out pavilion dedicated to your essential needs. The only problem remaining is to connect it to a suitable ‘foul water treatment installation’ and, of course, build it on time.
Christina and Wasfi have been busy on the forecourt fringes encouraging escapees from the garden and orchard, and incursions by the surrounding countryside; the same countryside that over the last 90 years has colonised the meadow that was the Home Pittles and within which the opera house now stands. They are also discretely introducing plant life – quinces, hazels and foxgloves – that might easily have taken hold without their encouragement had the agents of natural propagation been a little more imaginative.
And, of course, there is the opera house itself. Again, we await confirmation of the planning authority, but we expect, very shortly, to commence clothing the skeletal bulk of the building with cross gartered brickwork and finely wrought timber boarding.
David Lloyd Jones