Percival Clayton

Victoriana Percival Clayton

While at school Kenneth Grahame was most brutally thrashed - thrashed so severely that as an adult he failed to achieve any kind of emotional or sexual maturity; consequentially, Kenneth Grahame remained the eternal boy. As an adult he behaved like an infant; and his infantilism - especially with regard to his wife - remained charged with a peculiar deviance or decadence that was not untypical for those whose homosexually-orientated schooling reified the mid-Victorian ethos of imperial conquest. The Secret Life of Kenneth Grahame fuses the theatrical methods of a Victorian Social Comedy (the 'well-made' play) with those of a modern Absurdist Farce. More specifically, this play incorporates elements from a wide field of Nineteenth Century theatrical genres, including parodies and pastiches, together with popular elements developed from those 'unliterary' plays of the earlier Stock Companies and Adaptation Factories; and all these diverse theatrical forms bring forward some of the methods and practices of an even older stage. The songs for Victoriana offset the closed 'world' of Kenneth Grahame's damaged psyche with a music that celebrates those Edwardian Concert-Party entertainments devised to meet the needs of a 'refined and respectable' audience.