All literature can be considered as an expression of the movement of ideas. This is even more true of stage plays, which are written for production at a particular time and perhaps a particular place. It is especially true of Jefferson’s Garden, which mainly deals with the period, more than two centuries ago, when ideas were being formulated that, for us, are the basis of the free world.

Thomas Jefferson is best known to us as a contributor to the concepts of American independence and later as third President of the USA.

The author, Timberlake Wertenbaker, has a playwriting career of some 30 years and it is no surprise this play abounds in philosophical, historical and literary allusions. One of the most important is the use of the chorus. All the cast, temporarily leaving their roles, comment individually (sometimes together) on aspects of the story.

The play looks back to the expectations of a small group of Quaker immigrants to New England, presumably about 1755, and to their conflicting convictions about loyalty to the British Crown and their beliefs about freedom and pacifism. It can be no accident that the most emphatic spokesman for freedom is called Christian. The role is played with conviction, and sometimes with almost excessive vigour, by David Burnett.

Wertenbaker’s style throughout (in varying degrees) is formal as well as forceful, differing from the emotional and subtle romanticism that is often found in modern writing. As Carl, Christian’s father, William Hope has a more thoughtful role. Such serious matters, if debated by characters in a play, have to be incorporated in their personalities, and in this Wertenbaker is not entirely successful. GB Shaw did it better.

Today we have mixed feelings about Jefferson’s association with slavery, which is the play’s other main theme. In this role, William Hope (again! – there are more characters than actors) expresses Jefferson’s internal debates and his arguments with others convincingly. The ideas look ahead to the French Revolution of the 1790s and the American Civil War of 1861-65 – by which date, of course, all the characters would have been dead.

Of the slave characters, Burt Caesar shows versatility in the somewhat self-contradictory role of James, and Mimi Ndiweni is persuasively eloquent as Susanna, who presents the dilemmas that faced the freed slave in the USA . The common-sense view comes, often at length, from Julia St John as Nelly Rose.

After the interval, much of the second act is set in Jefferson’s garden, where, setting out his career and ideals, he remarks ‘I only asked to look after my garden’. So said Voltaire’s Candide a century earlier, and alas, in either case, these wise words did not prevent the subsequent spilling of much blood.

The sets and props are minimal and the costumes are rough and ready, telling us little that we cannot tell anyway. Much praise is due to Brigid Larmour, who directs. She has done much for us at the Palace Theatre in recent years, and deserves a whole bunch of feathers in her cap, especially because the plot and the ideas do not constitute either comedy or tragedy in the usual senses. Perhaps we may adapt for them Balzac’s expression, La comedie humaine.