Gordon Bennett! Alan’s passed his sell-by date

Talking Heads (Theatre Royal Bath) Verdict: Bennett better in small doses

THEY are a generous lot at the Theatre Royal in Bath, and you could sense them willing Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads to succeed. That i s the curse of a ‘national treasure’ such as Mr Bennett. People think they know what is coming and the potential for discovery is reduced.

Mr Bennett is a masterly prose writer, but on stage that distinctive Yorkshire maudlin can become monotonous. The box-office draw here is Stephanie Cole from Waiting For God and other TV shows.

Again, audience members arrive thinking ‘Stephanie Cole is always so good’ and it becomes harder for her to persuade them she is the character on stage rather than the character off the box.

Talking Heads is three doleful monologues. Miss Cole appears in the third as a 72-year-old Northern widow who has had a fall. Mr Bennett, himself now aged 81, wrote the play in the mid-Eighties and some of the domestic descriptions of fading lower-middle-class gentility, now taste distinctly antique. We should perhaps enjoy these plays as museum pieces rather than reaching for any modern relevance, as director Sarah Esdaile does with her surreal-walled staging.

Miss Cole turns in a tidy enough performance, but i t seldom sparkles. Siobhan Redmond fails rather terribly in the first monologue as a woman with a mania for writing letters of complaint.

The best acting of the night comes from Karl Theobald as a middle-aged bachelor who lives with his old mum.

Director Esdaile has an iffy evening, but all the bottled-up loneliness of Planet Bennett is sketched in here.