Like the film, Enchanted April, the play, is delightful, and just a little magical. Four women, stuck in their lives for various reasons in the 1920's end up taking a holiday together for the month of April in a castle in Italy. Their lives are forever changed... for the better, and all it took was some warm weather, some time away from men, and a shared love of wisteria. Elizabeth von Arnim's book was a bestseller in 1922, and the 1992 film starring Miranda Richardson and Joan Plowright, among others, was an indie, crowd-pleaser in the Downton Abbey vein.

The play keeps the lovely, magical sense of wonder and revelation, and can't help but make the reader smile even when forced into the most contrived circumstances. Matthew Barber's speeds along beautifully and offers a nice contrast between the humdrum British day-to-day lives of these ladies, and the exotic, free-spirited holiday in Italy.

One of my favorite plays of all time. Barber is witty and does an excellent job at taking a cerebral book and translating it to dialogue that creates interesting relationships. I will love Enchanted April always.

This is, remarkably, the very first play by Matthew Barber, and it is deftly and beautifully written. Barber, who has based his script on the same 1922 novel that inspired the famous film, gets right to the point in his taut dramatization, having his central character, Lotty Wilton, recount for us a story she once heard. It seems that an old man has decided that he wants an acacia tree, and so he plants his walking stick in the ground as a reminder. He returns to the spot some time later, and it seems that the stick has taken root; a blossom is at its base--an acacia. It's a charming and apt parable, for Enchanted April is about planting sticks in the earth we trod everyday, and willing them to bloom.

The time is February 1922, memories of the terrible first World War still fresh in everybody's mind; the place is damp, dour, dismal London. Lotty, the dutiful unhappy wife of a solicitor named Mellersh Wilton, happens upon an advertisement in the Times for a castle on the Italian Riviera, available to let during the month of April. The promise of wisteria, sunshine, and the blue waters of the Mediterranean awakens something in Lotty, and she bolsters up her courage and approaches Rose Arnott, whom she does not know, though she has seen her at church (and who reminds her of "a disappointed Madonna"). Lotty soon convinces the wary Rose that they should go on holiday to this castle at Mezzago. Both women, for different reasons, are stuck in marital ruts; the change of air and scenery, absent their husbands, betokens rejuvenation and a kind of independence neither has known.

The rental on the Italian castle is £60, so Lotty and Rose decide to advertise themselves for two more tenants. The only responses come from Lady Caroline Bramble, a bored, beautiful and rich young socialite; and Mrs. Graves, an imperious old widow whose father, as she never tires of telling people, knew Tennyson. This unlikely foursome, against the odds to be sure, decide to take the plunge together, and as Enchanted April's first act ends, they are on their way to adventure in Italia.

And in Act Two, they have their adventure--all of them, along with Messrs. Arnott and Wilton and a young man named Antony Wilding who is the owner of the castle and winds up spending time with the ladies on an unplanned detour from Rome. But their enchanted April is no simple makeover; what they experience--thanks to Lotty's bravery and willingness to open herself up to something new and vital and unexpected--is authentic renewal. Each of these seven people is sad and stunted when we first meet them, for various and different reasons. But once they allow the sun and sea and wisteria to enlarge their perspective on the world, they blossom.