The charming but sometimes dark world of P G Wodehouse

It touches on the war-time controversies which saw Wodehouse branded a traitor (unfairly, Robert believes). But these are just one element of a much broader portrait of a truly fascinating man.

“The wartime broadcasts are part of the play but they are only part of the story which is set within the context of so many other things like his early work as a Broadway lyricist working with Gershwin and Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. It also deals with his personal tragedies and his thoughts on getting older. The wartime broadcasts are there but they are set within the context of the whole of his life. It is not putting Wodehouse on trial, far from it. It is putting Wodehouse in context. It is about his time in history and how he stayed resolutely writing about a certain period of history, the Edwardian period and how he never actually wrote about anything beyond it and how he was actually writing about an Edwardian period that never really existed anyway. The play deals with the heart of the man, the spirit of the man, the quite childlike quality of the man, somebody of whom the worst you could say was probably just that he was somebody who could not deal with the world outside his lovely bubble. He never wrote about the world as it actually was; and everything was lovely in that bubble. You have to wonder whether he would be able to actually survive now and the fact is that he would not have been able to. He would have just shut himself away like a hermit. It was a fascinating life and the people around him let him just stay in his bubble.”

“It's a new play and the starting point is that it is called Wodehouse in Wonderland which was actually the title that he gave to his diaries from the war years that were never actually published. The idea is that it is a memory play. I was talking to Bill who wrote it and it just reminds me of that black and white drawing of Charles Dickens sitting in his study with all these bubbles above his head filled with all the different characters that he created that are just stacking up above him like planes about to land at Gatwick. It is a little bit like that!”

Wodehouse in Wonderland takes place in P G Wodehouse’s New York State home in the 1950s. Plum, as he is known to family and friends, is working away at the latest adventures of Bertie Wooster but is interrupted by a young would-be biographer, his adored wife, daughter Snorkles and his two Pekingese.

He shares stories about how Jeeves entered his life, how he became addicted to American soap operas and why he wrote books that were ‘like musical comedies without music’. He sings songs composed by Broadway legends with lyrics written by himself,and entertains the audience with characters such as Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Lord Emsworth, Gussie Fink-Nottle and the squashily romantic Madeline Bassett…but there’s also a darker story beneath the fun.