Lyn Gardner catches up with playwright Holly Robinson ahead of The Secret Garden coming to the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre

Playwright Holly Robinson says she really doesn’t waste too much time “shaking my fist at the sky about the version of my career I could have had without the pandemic.” Instead, she has been getting on with the job. This month she makes a giant leap from the upstairs space at Soho Theatre, where her remarkable debut play, the delicate, heartbreaking two-hander, Soft Animals, was staged in 2019, to the 1,300-seat Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. The show is an adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s much-loved The Secret Garden, co-written with the director and writer, Anna Himali Howard, and boasting a cast of 12.

Robinson describes herself and Himali Howard as “kindred spirits," both originally from Birmingham, who bonded over a shared regard for particular practitioners (Robinson cites Katie Mitchell, Sally Cookson, and Alice Birch as influences), shared politics, and a deep love of particular texts. High on that list of texts was The Secret Garden, the story of Mary Lennox, the recently orphaned child who is dispatched from India to her uncle’s chilly Yorkshire mansion, Misselthwaite Manor.

Anna Himali Howard & Holly-Robinson during The Secret Garden rehearsals.

“She’s a strange, neglected little girl who has had a really hard time, and she finds herself in this house full of grief. Through her strangeness and her insistence, she turns everything upside-down and completely changes the house and the people living there. I have always been drawn to those strange or weird Victorian girls that nobody likes,” says Robinson, who in the last year has been diagnosed with ADHD and along the way to that diagnosis also realised she was autistic. “We haven’t written Mary as necessarily autistic,” says Robinson, but she reckons some of literature’s most famous heroines may well have been, including Anne of Green Gables and Jane Eyre, as well as Mary.

It was Himali Howard who was originally invited to talk with Regent's Park Open Air Theatre about possible projects and who mentioned that she and Robinson were eager to adapt The Secret Garden. Robinson recognised that the theatre was taking a huge risk—"they said I had never written a big show and needed to know I could handle it, which was hard but true”-- but is full of praise for the way the Open Air Theatre proceeded by offering stepping stones.

Hannah Khalique Brown during The Secret Garden rehearsals.

“They read Soft Animals and some of my other work, and they found the money to give Anna and I a week to write three scenes. In fact, we had been talking about it for so long that we handed in eight scenes and a plan for the rest of the play, and we said this is what we are offering you, and either you want this version, or you don’t, and you want somebody else’s version of the story.” The Regent's Park Open Air Theatre commissioned it, and it has taken two years to reach the stage, during which Robinson had her own grief, including the loss of her mentor, Adam Brace, whose dramaturgical support of Soft Animals was so crucial. Brace was the first person to tell Robinson that she was a writer and make her believe it.

But what is it that drew Robinson and Himali Howard to the story?

“We certainly haven’t come at it as this fuddy duddy old text that needs shaking up by us, a couple of young women. We really love it. The text is in our bones,” says Robinson, who argues that it is a book that is deeply concerned with justice, colonialism, and questions of how we care.

Theo Angel and Jack Humphrey during The Secret Garden rehearsals.

But of course, she and Himali Howard have made decisions in the way they have told the story and some elements of it, and they recognise that there are areas that are problematic, particularly around racism and attitudes towards disability, which reflect the time when the original was written. “But I think the decisions we’ve taken speak for themselves,” says Robinson, who adds mischievously, “it is still set in 1903 and there is a bonnet on stage.”

She and Himali Howard see it as a love letter to the book that will be loved by those who love it as much as she and Howard do.

"Obviously, there will be some people, no matter what you do, who will be angry that we have taken some characters who were white in the book and made them Indian, but that is simply not my concern. I can’t fix the hearts of every racist in the country. I’m not talking to them; I’m talking to those who love this book. I’m not saying everyone who loves the book will love our version, but I’m not worried because I know the intentions, the themes, the rhythm, and the feeling are all there.”

Cover photo from The Secret Garden opening at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre on 15th June 2024. Book your tickets here.