This vehicle does Bennett’s familiar story proud
Sometime in the late Nineties, I found myself on a park bench in north London when a middleaged female tramp lurched past. I don’t recall what she was wearing, but I do remember one loud, angry, impatient outburst – “I’m SO BUSY!”
I caught a glimpse of a fretful existence which, far from being released from the shackles of work, was loaded with constant activity.
Exactly that counter-intuitive attitude can be found in The Lady in
the Van, Alan Bennett’s haunting, highly entertaining and knowingly embellished 1999 portrait of the destitute Miss Mary Shepherd (so-called), who came to reside in the playwright’s front garden in 1974, with dilapidated van, malodorous human emissions and an air of mystery, only leaving it on her death 15 years later.
Here was a woman whose life had effectively come to a stop years before (the result, we glean, of unhappy days as a novitiate nun, an aborted calling as a concert pianist, and a guilty secret that left her in fear of the law) and yet who continued to chug along on the basis that there was heaps to be doing. Miss Shepherd’s arrival on the scene therefore overturns the expected norms. Instead of his “lodger” fitting into his schedule, it’s the other way round: whether that means facilitating the painting of her battered Bedford or scooping her deposited poop.
It’s a bold actress who follows in the footsteps of Maggie Smith, who originated the role and reinvigorated it for Nick Hytner’s 2015 film. Sara Kestelman has the sort of expressive face that looks as if it has seen real pain. She doesn’t have Smith’s winningly arch loftiness, but they’re cut from the same cloth – yet a broader hint of being defensively alert to her own strangeness wouldn’t go amiss.
In general, Jonathan Church’s production, which boasts a fine symbiotic double-act from Sam Alexander as the patience-of-a-saint Bennett and James Northcote as his acidic alter-ego – is serviceable rather than superlative, yet it still does the now-familiar story proud.