A darker shade of Bennett
STORIES are often changed by the context in which they are told. And in the context of Covid-19, Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues — originally written for TV in the Eighties and Nineties — look a whole lot darker.
You may already have seen The Shrine, starring Monica Dolan, and A Bed Among The Lentils, with Lesley Manville, on TV or iPlayer this summer. But the series of celebrated playlets are getting a second outing at Sir Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre in London (in rep with David Hare’s monologue Beat The Devil, starring Ralph Fiennes).
I’ve always tended to think of Bennett as a kindly old grandad who turns his wry wit on the quiet lives of ordinary people. But these two stories struck me here as a little less benign.
In The Shrine, Dolan plays a mature lady keeping vigil on the A65 near Skipton at the site where her husband died in a motorbike accident. Thanks to flowers left by a stranger and the coroner’s discovery of unbuttoned trousers, she realises he wasn’t the man she thought he was.
A Bed Among The Lentils finds Manville playing the mousey wife of a North Yorkshire vicar. But the mouse learns to roar — in bed — after her quest for sherry leads her to the liquor counter of an Indian shopkeeper. An amusing set-up, of course, but both plays are also laced with bitter caricatures of those who still practise Bennett’s lapsed Anglicanism.
This is in no way an aspersion on the performances. Dolan’s bereaved wife, clinging to her grief, has a voice hollowed by sadness that occasionally thickens to suppress insurgent emotion.
And as ‘Mrs Vicar’ in her limp, drab clothes, Manville delivers an acerbic performance, centred on a knot of resentment which her character nurses with altar wine and Benson & Hedges.
Both pieces are sparsely presented: the first with a budget kitchen and projections of hedgerows, the second with mock-Tudor rectory furniture and projections of rain. They make elegant place holders, keeping the theatre warm until we get back to normal.
I’LL never shake the memory of Maureen Lipman, below, as the Jewish granny in the Eighties BT ads. But this online recording, made at Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, could be the best performance I’ve seen her give.
Rose is a revival of Martin Sherman’s play about an elderly woman recalling her life in the 20th century.
The memoir charts familiar but, at times, horrifying territory. Rose recounts her journey, from Cossack assaults on her Shtetl in Ukraine in the 1920s to finding love in Warsaw and the battle of the ghetto in 1943 — before making a new life, with a new husband, as a hotelier in New Jersey.
With grandchildren growing up in Israel, she goes on to pose uncomfortable questions about Israeli army violence today.
Lipman’s solo performance has the quality of a testimony to a tribunal and Rose’s breathing difficulties due partly to the ravages of time are also triggered by strong emotion. Tellingly, she wears a striped smock subtly reminiscent of death camp uniforms.
It’s a long haul — 80 years in two hours — but one that should surely earn Lipman an ‘ology’.
■ SPECULATING on what you might do at the end of the world is traditionally a vice of adolescent boys. It is now the premise of John Morton’s radio play Denouement, available on Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre website starring Ian McElhinney (Granda Joe in Derry Girls) and his wife Marie Jones (the writer of Stones In His Pockets). The relationship between their 68- and 70-year-old characters Adele and Liam is credible enough, as they face extinction on the West Coast of Ireland in the year 2048. But Morton has Adele bingeing on cocaine while Liam decides, bizarrely, that now is a good time to write his memoirs. The dialogue is delivered in colourful Ulster brogue. Dogs howl at the door, requiring regular mercy killings (thank heavens this is just an audio play); and both characters rue past affairs. As a portrait of a marriage, it’s brilliant. As a vision of Armageddon, it’s utterly daft.