“People, People who need people”… Barbara Streisand’s famous song wasn’t the inspiration for Alan Bennett’s latest play for the National Theatre. In fact if Bennett’s theme is understood it’s more a case of people who don’t want people. In a large, crumbling Georgian pile Lady Dorothy Stacpole is confined to one room, the leaking roof,…
Love thy neighbour, they say, but when your neighbour turns out to be a vagrant who lives in a van first outside your house and then in your garden it makes that love difficult. Though this may seem a wonderful fictional creation by Alan Bennett, The Lady In The Van is surprisingly one of his…
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, declares Shakespeare’s Henry IV, but it’s the Bard’s King Lear that provides the redemption for the troubled head of King George III in Alan Bennett’s historical epic. It is now 20 years since the play was first staged at the National Theatre and it’s been rarely performed…
After years of American imports and jukebox musicals, at long last the British musical is fighting back with a show about austerity Britain and a forthcoming Royal Wedding. Belts are being tightened, spending reviewed and parties being thrown to celebrate the royal nuptials. This isn’t 2011, though, but 1947 and Betty Blue Eyes, a musical…
In a rare outing, Alan Bennett’s epic play The Madness Of George III is currently touring the country but the only madness that sticks in one’s memory is that of the show’s designers. The wig designer, for example, seems to have raided a fancy dress shop to come up with tonsorial topiary that resembles an…