The Book That Invented the English Summer

There is a particular kind of English summer afternoon that Kenneth Grahame seems to have invented. Warm, unhurried, spent on or near a river, in the company of good friends with nowhere especially important to b

e. Reading The Wind in the Willows for the first time as an adult, I found myself wondering how a book written in 1908 could feel quite so much like a memory.

The Wind in the Willows gets its first outdoor performance at the briefly reopened Dell in Hitchin in 2021. A venue that Mat's mum performed at 70 years previously at it's opening!

Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows from bedtime stories he had been telling his son, spinning tales of Mole, Ratty, Badger and the irrepressible Mr Toad as the evenings drew in. The book that eventually emerged from those stories was published in 1908 and has barely been out of print since. It is one of those rare works that sits equally comfortably in a child's hands and an adult's, meaning entirely different things to each.

I came to it looking for a summer show. I wanted something that said outdoor theatre, family, nostalgia and long evenings in one breath, and The Wind in the Willows jumped out immediately. So I read it. And that was that, my mind was made up within the first few chapters.

While A Christmas Carol came to me already abridged for performance by its author, the same was not true of The Wind in the Willows. The original book runs to more than 60,000 words. A one man show needs somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000. That is quite a lot to lose.

The process took about three months. Some chapters could be set aside entirely, the diversions and side plots that Grahame indulged in and that readers love in the book but that would slow a performance to a standstill. Beyond that it was a matter of foreshortening the most recognisable scenes, finding the places where the story could breathe a little less without losing its pace or its heart. The rule I set myself was absolute: every word in the show had to appear in the original book, in the original order. I have added some punctuation to help it flow out loud, but not a single word has been changed or invented. Grahame's voice is entirely his own.

The show is mostly performed outdoors, which always felt right to me. This is a story about wildlife, nature and the turning of the seasons. It belongs outside. There is something about hearing Ratty rhapsodise about messing about in boats while sitting in an actual garden, under an actual sky, that no indoor staging can quite replicate.

A large gazebo will definitely keep your audience dry but don't expect to be heard if it rains.

It has not always been straightforward. At one performance in Aylesbury we had cover from the rain, which turned out to be less protection than anticipated when the heavens opened so dramatically that I had to shout the entire show at the top of my voice to be heard above the noise of it. The audience stayed. They were very British about it.

That stubbornness in the face of weather feels oddly appropriate for a story so rooted in the English countryside and its seasons. The Wind in the Willows does not pretend the world is always warm and golden. It knows about winter, about being lost, about the long way home. It just believes, rather firmly, that home is worth getting back to.

Which is perhaps why it has endured for well over a century, and why on a good summer evening, in a garden somewhere, it still feels like it was written last week.