The notion of art is as much about theatre as it is poetry or music. Alan Bennett is at his best when giving the audience a grim yet comedic take on social insight, and People provides exactly that. A Yorkshire couple and their upper-class country home are facing the necessary evil of becoming part of the heritage industry. The family fortune has faded — along with the house itself — and the Stacpoole family are struggling to maintain it, so aristocrat Dorothy Stacpoole faces the choice of either auctioning off the house, letting the National Trust open the house for visitors, or selling it to a shady consortium.
Contradictory to the latter, Dorothy allows her home to be used as the set for a porn film while she makes her decision. Bennett confessed that People came from an uneasiness he faced while visiting a National Trust house; the idea of being fed information about the rooms as you wander through them brought an uncomfortable feeling to the experience. We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements.
To allow us to provide a better and more tailored experience please click "OK". Sign Up. Travel Guides. Videos Beyond Hollywood Hungerlust Pioneers of love. That stems originally from Mrs Thatcher: she did believe that Labour was wicked. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it.
And those who receive it know it, or should. One has only had to stand still to become a radical. He is a royalist as well as a socialist. Mirren was a good egg, he says, last time he performed on stage. They did it twice and the first time I slightly messed it up — though since the lines were in French hardly anyone knew. But I knew. The lies on the front page of the Mail are so vulgar and glaring. Like all men of his generation, Bennett did national service. Everyone at his school knew there was a possible get-out clause that could be invoked by bright boys: the Russian course, an intensive language training aimed at providing interpreters, translators and sometimes intelligence officers.
I had harboured a small and ludicrous fantasy that Bennett might also have ended up spying, but am swiftly disabused. He had never been away from home before he was raised in Leeds, except for a brief period when his parents moved to Guildford. And there he was, in Cambridge, and with a bit of money, too. Having already been offered a place to study at the university the following year, he realised that other people on the Russian course had won scholarships — so he reapplied, this time to Oxford.
I was quite conservative and Christian and rather priggish when I went into the army. That began to go, I hope. I can say I love England. That is true of me, I think. Almost single-handedly, Beyond the Fringe revolutionised British satire, moving it from Goonish surrealism towards pointed, often controversial political comment.
Although he would publish five of these scripts under the title The Writer in Disguise , there was little overt autobiography, but much delving into recurring preoccupations, be they shyness and loneliness Me!
The play that garnered most attention, much of it strongly negative, was The Old Crowd , an unusually experimental piece for mainstream British television, though much of its confrontational style came from director and uncredited co-writer Lindsay Anderson.
Bennett returned to the BBC for his second cycle of plays, given the unofficial collective title Objects of Affection As before, one piece stood out for stylistic innovation, the monologue A Woman of No Importance , with Patricia Routledge inaugurating what may be Bennett's most lasting television monument.
Stephen Frears, The last of these was Bennett's second cinema screenplay: his first, A Private Function d. Malcolm Mowbray, revisited the postwar Yorkshire of his boyhood in a story of food rationing and unlicensed pig smuggling. The title was inspired by the adage that "talking heads" made bad television, but Thora Hird , Maggie Smith , Stephanie Cole , Julie Walters , Patricia Routledge and Bennett himself comprehensively countered it, painting unforgettable portraits of damaged lives and thwarted expectations.
It took less than a decade for them to appear on the A-level syllabus, cementing their modern classic status. A second, equally acclaimed series followed in Although wary of the media fuelled by horror at the way the tabloids hounded his friend Russell Harty as he lay dying in hospital , he would gradually reveal more personal information via carefully-selected diary extracts, published first in the London Review of Books and then collated in the surprise best-seller Writing Home Bennett's previously prolific output slowed noticeably in the late s and early s.
He initially complained that he had been suffering from writer's block before finally admitting that he had undergone treatment for cancer in This was revealed in his collection of confessional essays, Untold Stories originally written in the expectation that they would appear posthumously: they also dealt frankly with his homosexuality, a family history of mental illness, and his motives for refusing a knighthood.
The Single Spies double bill of plays for the National Theatre examines, through the stories of two members of the Cambridge Soviet spy ring, double identities and English lives lived in exile and in secret.
Bennett was a prolific writer for television during the s and 80s, but the Talking Heads , series of monologues has arguably made the greatest impact on the medium. In recent years Bennett has chosen to reveal more personal stories: in Untold Stories he writes for the first time about his cancer and homosexuality, describing in vivid detail an homophobic attack he and his partner suffered whilst on holiday in Italy.
Here, as in Forty Years On, 35 years earlier, school can be read as a metaphor for nation: differences between the cultural references in the two plays chart further shifts in British cultural and social life. Here he is in our office, looking cheerful even though we'd probably just asked him to sign… 3 years ago. We publish a Literature Newsletter when we have news and features on UK and international literature, plus opportunities for the industry to share. To subscribe to the newsletter, until further notice, please press the subscribe button.
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