Alan Bennett - a national treasure?

Alan Bennett is often seen as a blend of cultural teddy bear and national

treasure. The image is cuddly, unthreatening, even mild. But anyone who knows his work realises he cuts a far more controversial and challenging figure. His huge output of work over more than 50 years touches on topics such as loneliness, privilege,nationhood, the role of the artist, homosexuality, espionage, the loathsomeness of politicians and the relationship between men and boys. These things are most certainly not cuddly (Daily Telegraph 2015).

My second visit to the excellent Bridge Theatre was to see Alan Bennett's latest play Allelujah! Set in the geriatric wing of a Yorkshire hospital at full stretch, its future hanging in the balance, Allelujah! throws up a collage of characters and a criss-cross of subplots. Among the patients, singing in the hospital’s in-house OAP choir, are a retrograde ex-miner still railing against Margaret Thatcher, a good-hearted grammar-stickler of a former schoolteacher, and a well-to-do heiress wishing she’d had the cash to go private. They’re cared for by Doctor Valentine, a personable physician at risk of deportation by an increasingly hostile state, and the formidable ward mistress Sister Gilchrist, a clean-freak with no time for the incontinents whose names she keeps — ominously — on a list. (Variety review July 2018)

Bennett's writing is, as always, warm, fully of wry humour and faith in humankind

and his nostalgic socialism shines through as he bemoans the state of the NHS and the drive for centralisation. Allelujah is part revue, part sit-com but with a serious side and some great one-liners: "Heaven will be just like Heathrow, there'll be a VIP lounge". The singing and dancing of the geriatric patients is just brilliant and really makes this play a must-see - only on until 29th September!

I have always found Alan Bennett makes me laugh even when the subject matter is serious. His first play I saw was The History Boys with the late Richard Griffiths as an A level history teacher and the now famous James Cordern and Dominic Cooper amongst others, as students pursuing an undergraduate place at Oxbridge in the 1980s. Their headmaster is determined to see them break records and enlists a new teacher to coach the boys into intellectual shape. Seduced though they are by his promises, the boys are concerned that there is more to the pursuit of learning than exams and grades. Also starring the incomparable Frances de la Tour, this was made into a 2006 film so you can still see it.

For a less political but equally funny play and film, if you haven't seen The Lady in the Van starring the inimitable Maggie Smith, you really must. The film tells the true story of the relationship between Alan Bennett and the singular Miss Shepherd, a woman of uncertain origins who ‘temporarily’ parked her van in Bennett’s London driveway and proceeded to live there for 15 years. Their unique story is funny, poignant and life-affirming.

Reading Alan Bennett is just as good. His diaries can be dipped into when you need to be cheered up. However, one of my favourite books is The Uncommon Reader which imagines the Queen discovering the joy of reading through a mobile library parked in the royal grounds. The Queen may well be a reader, though we have little evidence of it, but how delightful to imagine it. Finding herself apologising to the librarian when her corgis yap at the steps of the van, she ends up taking out a novel for politeness and so begins a passion for reading so great that her public duties begin to suffer.

Fintan O'Toole, writing in the Allelujah programme in May 2018, describes Alan Bennett as an "Anglo-Saxon Chronicler" and says: "The greatest chroniclers record the past but also sense the future. If, instead of seeing his work as cosy and nostalgic, more attention had been paid to the terrible sense of loss that runs through it, the great crisis of Englishness that led to Brexit might not have come as such a shock".

Wise words.