The Exploits of Engelbrecht Read Online Free PDF

Production of King Lear with an all-Oak cast and the audience are still there to this day.
    Of course the Old Plant Theatre of Varieties isn’t quite as slow as all that. They go in for Revue with choruses of cannas and herbaceous borders and orchids as stars, insects to carry the pollen about and an occasional bird to drop the seed from the O.P. side to the wings. But even so the tempo is a good deal slower than most people are used to.
    The theatre itself is a cross between the Hollywood Bowl, Kew Gardens, and the old Leicester Square Empire. A good deal of it is in the open air, but the whole place is tangled up with gilt and greenery, plush and moss.
    We arrived just before the curtain went up. The “thing that was scarcely a thing” at the Almighty Whirlitzer was coming to the end of Trees, which is more or less the National Anthem, as you might say, of the plant world, and the atmosphere was vibrating with the intensity that invariably betokens a Plant’s first night. Engelbrecht and I were sitting just in front of the Editor of the Fly Paper, and I remember Engelbrecht saying sharply over his shoulder: “If you don’t stop buzzing, you Goddamned blue-bottle, I shan’t be able to hear the rustling of the leaves.”…
     
    That shows you he was a bit lit. Engelbrecht would never have spoken to an editor like that if he’d been stone cold sober. His sense of publicity is far too keen. Lizard Bayliss, who was sitting on his other side, was dreadfully upset. “You didn’t ought to have done that, kiddo,” he kept saying. “You know how touchy he is. See! There goes one of his ruddy little correspondents buzzing off back to the office now. Now you mark my words, there’ll be a nasty little bit of dirt about you spread all over his sticky front page tomorrow. Engelbrecht drunk again, I shouldn’t wonder. Drunk again the night before a fight... And there’ll be an inquiry and we shall lose the purse.” Just then the lights went out, the rain came down and the curtain went up on the first scene of: Ash Before Oak.
    Now this, only we didn’t know it at the time, represented a new venture on the part of a couple of old cowslips with more dew than sense who planned to strike a blow for the homely English Flora as opposed to all the exotic tropical blooms— orchids, frangipani, bougainvillea, date palms, sandalwood— that had been monopolizing the plant variety stage for so long. The star of the show, if you please, was a floppy hollyhock that the old cowslips had got a crush on at the last horticultural show. The whole thing was set in an English spring and summer— a wet one of course as you can tell by the title. The plot turned on a lot of cosy friendly rivalry between the Oak and the Ash as to which should be out first, with an idiotic garden party where the exotic tropical plants were made to look cheap and flashy beside the cottage garden brigade, attended by a ballet of cabbage whites.
    The first scene was “Somewhere In February”. The rain came down like a grey steel curtain, week after week, and nothing happened except a drip, drip, drip, plop, splash, plop. By the time it got round to March, and one or two green shoots were supposed to appear, most of us were beginning to get a bit restive. And when something went wrong with the wind machine so that it started blowing the March gale slap in our faces instead of back stage, we all turned as one man on Nodder Fothergill and asked what the hell he thought he was doing bringing us to our deaths of pneumonia in this hell hole. Nodder said how could he know it was going to be such a confounded flop, and we’d better turn it in and head for home.
    But when we got up to go we had a nasty shock. Every exit was barred by oaks and ranged behind us was a dense row of whacking great thorn bushes, and when Charlie Wapentake protested, one of them bore down on him and lashed him to his seat with withies. Seems there’s been a conspiracy on the part of the