Alan Bennett: English theatre’s great radical
As Bennett’s latest play opens, Ben Lawrence argues that he is no cuddly national treasure, but a writer of both humanity and grit
At the end of his 2005 diary, Alan Bennett wrote: “I am in the pigeonhole marked ‘no threat’ and were I to stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a Teddy bear.” In the public imagination, Bennett is cuddly. Remember him reading The House at Pooh Corner on Jackanory, or ruminating on the wonders of Westminster in a BBC documentary; that light, quizzical voice sending us into raptures of provincial Englishness – tea shops, National Trust and stained glass windows by Burne-jones?
That image, though, has passed its sell-by date and, as a new Bennett play, Allelujah!, opens at the Bridge Theatre in London, it is time to remember that Bennett is, above all, a radical, who has constantly challenged the state of the nation and what it means to be English since his first hit, Forty Years On, was produced in the West End in 1968.
That play was about the English public school system, and since then it seems as if no corner of society has escaped his attention. The Madness of George III (1993) not only examined the pressures of monarchy but also spoke, very movingly, about the stigma of mental illness. In The Lady in the Van, based on his experiences of allowing a homeless woman to park in his Camden Town driveway, he examined how the metropolitan elite, despite supposed gestures of bleeding-heart liberalism, can close ranks when faced with an unruly outsider. Allelujah! centres on a hospital on the edge of the Pennines, threatened with closure. “He doesn’t present himself as a political playwright,” says Nicholas Hytner, director of every new Bennett work since 1990. “He does not seem self-consciously radical, yet the state of England has defined his career.”
Indeed, defining Bennett’s work is tricky, with his diaries, occasional novellas, playwriting and TV melding into a cohesive but complex whole. He is sometimes labelled as a northern writer, or a gay writer, or a political writer, but he is not really any of these things, at least not volubly so.
“Division, contradiction, nuance and ambiguity are all his hallmarks,” explains Hytner, “and that puts him at odds with current politics and current political commentary, which is based on the suppression of these things.”
These contradictions and ambiguities are probably the reason why, in the past, there has been some ideological confusion over what Bennett represents. To some, Bennett’s affection for old churches and stately homes would suggest that he is a heritage brand to be treasured, but this is misleading. Hytner says Bennett is not a nostalgist, that he is suspicious of faux nationalism and, furthermore, is offended by how the phrase “nanny state” has become a pejorative term.
“Alan says how glad he was to be nannied. He is from a modest Leeds family and was nannied through grammar school, university, free public libraries, free and cheap theatre and concert tickets.”
This gladness is complex, sometimes turning into a lament. Bennett’s great populist hit, The History Boys, can be seen as a work written in anger, a battle cry against the erosion of grammar “yeah,” school education and the upbraiding of teachers such as Hector who tend to stray from the confines of the syllabus.
Journalist Tom Sutcliffe once described Bennett as being “exemplary in his hatreds” and indeed fans of his diaries will know how barbed he can be. For example, he expends much ire on Tony Blair (one memorable passage shows his disdain for the former prime minister’s use of supplementary adverbs – I understand – when sending his condolences to the family of Jean Charles de Menezes who was gunned down at Stockwell tube in 2005).
If his fictional work is less obviously confrontational, that is because he feels it is his artistic duty to provide all sides of an argument. But this itself can often be subversive. We find ourselves in sympathy with a paedophile in Playing Sandwiches (1998) because of his mental anguish, and with a traitor to his country (Guy Burgess in An Englishman Abroad, 1983) because, it is suggested, the roots for his betrayal come from something deep and ineffable in the English psyche.
“I think he thinks it’s his job to imagine what it’s like to be deeply flawed,” says Hytner.
There is also the question of naturalism. Certainly Bennett has a
‘There’s a hard edge in the way he questions the headmaster in The History Boys’
gift for small talk (think of Talking Heads), but to dwell on that is to ignore his occasional need to revolutionise the form. One of his greatest (and most under-appreciated) plays, Enjoy (1980), in which a Leeds council house is reacquisitioned and transported – along with its residents – to a local museum where it will serve as an embodiment of working-class life – is surreal, any conventional narrative entirely absent.
Naturally, if there are contradictions in Bennett’s writing, one must assume there are contradictions in his personality. One diary entry reflects on how Bennett and his partner Rupert Thomas are watching Wuthering Heights when Thomas remarks that Bennett is rather like Heathcliff. “Oh,” says Bennett, his ego momentarily swollen. says Thomas. “Difficult, northern and a c---.”
If this is true, and one imagines that Thomas knows Bennett better than anyone, then you can detect a hard edge in the way he questions characters such as the results-driven headmaster in The History Boys (2004) or the suits from the National Trust who want to commodify a fading South Yorkshire stately home by turning it into an interactive, immersive experience in People (2013), his last full play.
Ultimately, though, it is his humanity for the characters who are misunderstood, mistreated or, above all, marginalised that stay with you.
“Alan is more like Gareth Southgate than any politician,” says Hytner. “I am not sure he’d know who Southgate is, but they both have that basic decency, that ability to see the other person’s point of view – the arm around the shoulder of the Colombian penalty taker who missed, that is Alan.”
Through his diaries over many years, Bennett has gently peeled away layers of his personality, revealing more of himself than he would have dared earlier in his career – in particular his diagnosis of colon cancer (with a tumour “the size of an average rock bun”) and a rather less oblique account of his sexuality (“coming out” seems rather an unlikely term for Bennett). This, I think, is important. As Bennett has learned to share, so he has become an even greater playwright.
At the age of 84, he still produces consistently great work – reversing the trend for playwrights whose careers peak somewhere in middle age. And, for all his political nous and comic brilliance, it is in his portrayal of human nature that Bennett is an undisputed master. Many great writers capture our essential ordinariness, others capture our essential strangeness. Only Alan Bennett does both.