CHIPPING CAMPDEN and the major novelist, Graham Greene are not immediately connected in the popular imagination, but they should be.

Perhaps relatively few people in the audience at Malvern Theatres, for a performance of Graham Green's "Travels With My Aunt" will realise that the writer not only travelled to Chipping Campden in the 1930s, but he actually lived there.

In 2012, the Evesham Journal reported that a blue plaque had been unveiled in Chipping Campden,"to commemorate a famous former resident".

Graham Greene spent two years living in Little Orchard Cottage on Hoo Lane, Back Ends, from 1931 to 1933 with his wife Vivien and Pekingese dog, Pekoe.

It was probably not exactly a rural idyll, despite a thatched roof.

He planned to stay for one year; but that soon turned into two, despite the lack of electricity and the rats, which he complained about in his letters.

But Greene enjoyed harvesting apples and growing lettuces at Orchard Cottage.

During his time in the Cotswolds, Greene wrote his first successful book, "Stamboul Train", which was later turned into the film Orient Express, - not to be confused with Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie.

Chipping Campden's High Street phone box was also to play its part in literary history, after an acquaintance of Greene's said the novelist had based one character on him, and Greene was left facing the prospect of being sued for libel.

Greene saved the day by phoning in urgent changes to his publisher from the High Street phone box.

Stamboul Train follows the adventures and interactions of various characters, aboard the train from Ostend to Istanbul.

Travel is also an obvious feature of "Travels With My Aunt", which will entertain a Malvern audience from Tuesday May 17 to Saturday, May 21, at the Festival Theatre.

A spokesman said: "Four actors will take on over twenty characters in this hilarious mad cap dash around the world with Henry Pulling.

"Henry is a retired suburban bank manager with a penchant for dahlias. He meets his eccentric Aunt Augusta at what he supposes to be his mother’s funeral."

The spokesman added: "She persuades him to abandon his dahlias and travel with her to Brighton, Paris, Istanbul and across the world to Paraguay, and Henry joins a shifty twilight society of pot smoking hippies, war criminals, men from the CIA and hard core art smugglers."

Graham Greene was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, and his most celebrated novels include Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

He was a complicated man; a convert to Catholicism who, none-the-less, was once accused of atheism by his devout wife.

In his writings, Greene often tackled questions of personal morality and the possibility of personal salvation, through divine intervention in ordinary life, - often complicated ordinary life.

Greene suffered from bi-polar disorder and he once wrote to his long-suffering wife, Vivien, that he was "profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life".

Whether he had his stay in Chipping Campden in mind, with its lettuce growing and apple gathering, cannot really be known at this distance in time.

But the comment could well be an excuse for the series of affairs Greene had, while married.

According to a passage in the study "Spy Fiction and Spy Fiction" (The Students' Academy), in the same letter Green told Vivien that his mental condition was "also one's material".

If so, he was able to turn his mental suffering into a a lifetime of first-rate work.

Grahame Greene died of leukaemia, aged 86, in 1991.

Tickets for "Travels With My Aunt" are available on 01684 892277.