The lockdown monologues
Playwright Alan Bennett’s iconic TALKING HEADS is back — reimagined for 2020 under self-quarantine conditions
WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS lockdown restrictions hit, all film and television productions had to shut down. For the latter, with the medium’s endless hours of schedules to be filled, this posed a problem. TV executives scratched their heads — how would a crew work under social distancing?
The answer, initially at least, was Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. “It was an act of great imagination by the BBC,” says long-time Bennett collaborator Nicholas Hytner, who is spearheading the project. “All drama production had shut down; the only thing they could imagine it was possible to make was monologues.”
Talking Heads, it was suggested, seemed tailor-made for the new way of working. The minimalist series, originally broadcast in 1988 and 1998, consists of 12 witty, melancholy and humanistic to-camera speeches from 12 actors, featuring stories about elderly romances, scurrilous antique dealers, even a reformed paedophile — but all, crucially, performed alone. Hytner — whose creative partnership with Bennett “goes back 30 years”, including adapting his plays The History Boys and The Lady In The Van into films — said yes immediately. “I thought it was a wonderful idea. And I spent a weekend working out how to make these things, under the big basic restriction that nobody could come closer than two metres to anybody else.”
The process was fast and “intense”, Hytner says. A cast of 12 acclaimed actors (including Jodie Comer, Martin Freeman and Kristin Scott Thomas) were assembled. Rehearsals took place over Zoom — “Not anything
I would recommend as a long-term solution,” he says, wearily — and sets were repurposed from existing ones at Elstree studios with a skeleton crew. Actors applied their own make-up, supervised by professionals. “Nothing was done that could not be done by one person.”
The result, Hytner says, is “12 beautiful monologues. They have been shot in such a way that,
I hope, in years to come, you would never know.” The isolationist approach to the pieces, he acknowledges, feels apt — to an extent. “Of course, at the moment, we are particularly sensitive to what it feels like to be isolated. They are totally appropriate. But I wouldn’t want to overdo that point.”
As achingly relevant as it might seem, Hytner argues, Talking Heads has always felt timely; since being first broadcast it’s become something of an institution, constantly revived on stage, and part of the A-level syllabus. “There’s a universality about them,” Hytner marvels. “There is no odd, unhappy, taboo corner of the human experience that Alan can’t write about from a certain point of view. They are stuffed full with incident, as well as emotional revelations and character insight. If you get Lesley Manville, doing something done originally by Maggie Smith, and she does it in a way that it no longer seems like it was done by Maggie Smith, that’s a classic. They’ll always deliver new insights, according to who the actor is.” They may have been produced out of necessity, but Talking Heads hopes to endure long beyond the pandemic.