Alan Bennett has written two short stage recollections. They
are everything one expects from his pen: essays in repressed nostalgia
and a genteel, grammar-school Northern Englishness which has been in
retreat since Sir John Barbirolli’s last concert at Leeds Town Hall.
You leave this show knowing a little more about the ‘Alan Bennett’ Alan Bennett wants you to know. That may be far from the truth, but it will probably satisfy Mr Bennett’s enviably large brigade of fans.
I went on Wednesday afternoon, a matinee being good Bennett territory. The pretty Duchess was packed with ageing, educated theatregoers, just the sort of people who, as the playwright observes, learned to sing Hymns Ancient & Modern at school in the Forties and Fifties.
History man: Alex Jennings as Alan Bennett in Untold Stories
The
show’s first piece, half an hour long, is called Hymn. It is a gentle
wander through old tunes and the memories they stir. A stage quartet
plays the likes of The King Of Love My Shepherd Is.
We hear not just about the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra (RIP) in the Fifties but also about Delius, J. B. Priestley, Bennett’s butcher father trying to teach young Alan the violin, the scepticism of 15-year-olds, and more. All this falls from the lips of a stage Bennett played — impersonated well, if with a little too much Yorkshire accent — by Alex Jennings.
Mr Jennings stars in the second, longer piece, too. Cocktail Sticks begins with Bennett clearing his parents’ kitchen cupboard after their deaths. Picking through the glacé cherries and old sauce bottles, he talks of ‘the remains of my mother’s little solitary meals’. What a beautiful line, freighted with sadness.
Cocktail Sticks has fine performances not only from Mr Jennings but also from Gabrielle Lloyd as Mr Bennett’s mam and Jeff Rawle as his dad. Derek Hutchinson and Sue Wallace provide various minor characters.
Mam is socially curious, keen to experiment with the ‘cockTAILS’ (she misplaces the emphasis) she reads about in a glossy magazine. The dad we see here never plays the violin. He is a more timid, contained soul whose love for Alan is evident only when he cries for the boy’s vulnerability as he begins National Service.
On one level the play is a beautiful, affectionate memoir. Mr Bennett claims to feel shame, now, that as an Oxford undergraduate he was ashamed of his low-class parents.
One of many well-pitched vignettes in Sir Nicholas Hytner’s production compares young Alan’s social awkwardness to the confidence with which his college friend Russell Harty showed off his ‘common’ parents to the dons.
The Chaucerian scholar Nevill Coghill was evidently much taken by Ma Harty.
In places, the artistic topspin is clumsy (it is not believable that Mam, trying to pinpoint the Third World, would say it begins with A — for ‘abroad’ she ventures, after searching for the word). L for Likely Tale.
Mam also comes up with a too-pat aphorism about Alan not being the same since he went to Oxford when he ‘stopped wearing a vest and started having your main meal at night’. Routine Bennett? Or lazy Bennett?
These recollections are entitled Untold Stories, but the real untold story may be less cardiganed and sweet. While ostensibly celebrating his parents, is Mr Bennett not laughing at them a little? His audience does. Writers can be brutes.
The playwright admits he saw Mam little when she was losing her mind. Does he feel guilt at visiting her for just ‘an hour every fortnight’? An honest playwright might tells us.
Freudians may busy themselves analysing Mr Bennett’s relationship with Mam. Political obsessive that I am, I find my interest pricked by uncharitable thoughts about the conduct of one of our more public Left-wingers.
Was Bennett not rich enough to offer more practical help to his elderly parents? And why does an artist so (properly) gripped by the importance of intellectual elitism not feel a greater anger at what Labour politicians have done to their own voters?
You leave this show knowing a little more about the ‘Alan Bennett’ Alan Bennett wants you to know. That may be far from the truth, but it will probably satisfy Mr Bennett’s enviably large brigade of fans.
I went on Wednesday afternoon, a matinee being good Bennett territory. The pretty Duchess was packed with ageing, educated theatregoers, just the sort of people who, as the playwright observes, learned to sing Hymns Ancient & Modern at school in the Forties and Fifties.
History man: Alex Jennings as Alan Bennett in Untold StoriesWe hear not just about the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra (RIP) in the Fifties but also about Delius, J. B. Priestley, Bennett’s butcher father trying to teach young Alan the violin, the scepticism of 15-year-olds, and more. All this falls from the lips of a stage Bennett played — impersonated well, if with a little too much Yorkshire accent — by Alex Jennings.
Mr Jennings stars in the second, longer piece, too. Cocktail Sticks begins with Bennett clearing his parents’ kitchen cupboard after their deaths. Picking through the glacé cherries and old sauce bottles, he talks of ‘the remains of my mother’s little solitary meals’. What a beautiful line, freighted with sadness.
Cocktail Sticks has fine performances not only from Mr Jennings but also from Gabrielle Lloyd as Mr Bennett’s mam and Jeff Rawle as his dad. Derek Hutchinson and Sue Wallace provide various minor characters.
Mam is socially curious, keen to experiment with the ‘cockTAILS’ (she misplaces the emphasis) she reads about in a glossy magazine. The dad we see here never plays the violin. He is a more timid, contained soul whose love for Alan is evident only when he cries for the boy’s vulnerability as he begins National Service.
On one level the play is a beautiful, affectionate memoir. Mr Bennett claims to feel shame, now, that as an Oxford undergraduate he was ashamed of his low-class parents.
One of many well-pitched vignettes in Sir Nicholas Hytner’s production compares young Alan’s social awkwardness to the confidence with which his college friend Russell Harty showed off his ‘common’ parents to the dons.
The Chaucerian scholar Nevill Coghill was evidently much taken by Ma Harty.
In places, the artistic topspin is clumsy (it is not believable that Mam, trying to pinpoint the Third World, would say it begins with A — for ‘abroad’ she ventures, after searching for the word). L for Likely Tale.
Mam also comes up with a too-pat aphorism about Alan not being the same since he went to Oxford when he ‘stopped wearing a vest and started having your main meal at night’. Routine Bennett? Or lazy Bennett?
These recollections are entitled Untold Stories, but the real untold story may be less cardiganed and sweet. While ostensibly celebrating his parents, is Mr Bennett not laughing at them a little? His audience does. Writers can be brutes.
The playwright admits he saw Mam little when she was losing her mind. Does he feel guilt at visiting her for just ‘an hour every fortnight’? An honest playwright might tells us.
Freudians may busy themselves analysing Mr Bennett’s relationship with Mam. Political obsessive that I am, I find my interest pricked by uncharitable thoughts about the conduct of one of our more public Left-wingers.
Was Bennett not rich enough to offer more practical help to his elderly parents? And why does an artist so (properly) gripped by the importance of intellectual elitism not feel a greater anger at what Labour politicians have done to their own voters?
