Alan Bennett still has the sharpest pen in Britain
If you’ve been living alone these past 85 days, you may have found yourself slowly morphing into one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. Lonely, bored, embittered, longing for some kind of physical or spiritual connection, even if only with the vicar. A penchant for soft furnishings and chrysanthemums. A Sunday afternoon stretched out for months, with nothing but your thoughts and your net curtains. You may have even developed a Yorkshire lilt. Who knew, when Bennett wrote the first tranche of them in the late Eighties, they would feel quite so 2020?
As a lockdown treat for the nation, the director Nicholas Hytner has rounded up a gaggle of our finest thesps to revive 10 of Bennett’s monologues for the BBC: Waiting for the Telegram and A Cream Cracker under the Settee have been jettisoned, presumably so no one had to try to follow the great Thora Hird. Bennett, at 86, has written two new ones: The Shrine and An Ordinary Woman. Two pieces of good news: he still has the sharpest pen in Britain and, phew, he has made no attempt to modernise.
Knowing that following in the footsteps of Patricia Routledge, Maggie Smith and Julie Walters is a daunting task, Hytner has spun his gilded Rolodex and called in favours from some big-hitters to perform the monologues: Kristin Scott Thomas, Jodie Comer and Lesley Manville among them. Martin Freeman takes the Scout badge for courage, however, as he stars in A Chip in the Sugar, which had Bennett himself originally as the mithering mummy’s boy, Graham Whittaker. Freeman allows his lines to clatter into each other, like a motorway pile-up, overdoing the intensity but adding a spiky edge. When he savours the language – corduroy, mangoes, cheeseburger – it hits home. Mainly, you miss Bennett, which is hardly Freeman’s fault.
It has, however, stood the test of the time, unlike one or two others. Comer and Rochenda Sandall (Line of Duty) are superb in Her Big Chance The
Outside Dog respectively, but the pieces, exquisitely written as they are, have aged badly. The gauche wannabe actress of Her Big Chance is hardly a feminist icon, accidentally sleeping, as she does, with four men in a 40-minute monologue. Sandall brings the freshest energy of all the new performers in The Outside Dog, but its Tales of the Unexpected/domestic violence twist feels ugly.
Some, dare I say, are an improvement on the original. In Soldiering On, originally performed by Stephanie Cole, Harriet Walter is inch-perfect as the hearty-old-girl, grieving widow who parrots her ex-husband’s life lessons at length and can’t see the wood for the trees when it comes to her children. The richness of Bennett’s writing begs for a light touch with roiling depths; Walter delivers. She also, like Routledge before her, knows which of Bennett’s words to relish. Listen out for how she says “cauliflower”. Perfection. Scott Thomas delivers a similarly powerful performance in The Hand of God, originally done by Eileen Atkins, as a snippy antiques dealer.
Bennett’s new pieces don’t break the mould. He is still fascinated by and cares deeply for the repressed, cardigan-wearing housewives of Middle England. A more uncharitable soul might mention the game of Talking Heads bingo they played while watching. (During The Shrine and An Ordinary Woman I ticked off unwelcome vicar, dead husband, nice Indian doctor, naive young copper and someone ending up in an institution – nearly a full house.) The Shrine, about a woman visiting the spot her husband died in a motorcycle accident, zips by in 25 minutes, with Monica Dolan spot on as the woman searching for the truth about her spouse after his death.
An Ordinary Woman is the one that will stick with you. Sarah Lancashire stars as Gwen, a mother who becomes besotted with her 15-yearold son, closing off the neat Oedipal circle begun by Graham Whittaker. Bennett is at his best when flirting with indecency and in his taut script, and Lancashire’s drip-feed performance, the monologue builds into something mesmerising and unbearably sad. As with The Shrine, it hasn’t the weight of Bennettisms the previous Heads sopped with, as if the writer was afraid of parodying himself. A wise choice.
Bennett hasn’t tried either to push the 2020 zeitgeist buttons, though the two new pieces lack the end-of an-era feel the original 12 had, when the war generation were watching their country grow unrecognisable. I don’t know about you, but my vicar hasn’t called round in some time.
Never less than interesting, at their best sublime – these films are a reminder of the sheer brilliance of Bennett.