The Stage

Enjoy

Published Tuesday 19 August 2008 at 11:45 by Jeremy Brien

The Peter Hall Company have unearthed a little-known Alan Bennett gem to close their sixth summer season in Bath.

Given only a lukewarm welcome when first produced in 1980, it is an anarchic comedy set in Bennett’s home town of Leeds, against a family background rather more akin to the plays of Joe Orton than his own in real life.

It is jam-packed with a wealth of typical anti-establishment opinions, ranging from how we patronise the elderly to our over-romanticised view of the past..

Connie and Wilfred Craven, made splendidly larger-than-life yet touchingly innocent by Alison Steadman and David Troughton, are an almost identical mum and dad to the characters played by Thora Hird and Hugh Lloyd in Bennett’s much shorter television play Say Something Happened.

Wilfred hides his bitter disappointment over his gay son and call girl daughter, while Connie lets such matters wash over her. He fears for the future and ends up in a nursing home. She wallows in the past and welcomes the prospect of living in a museum version of her back-to-back, rebuilt brick by brick in a theme park.

Director Christopher Luscombe, helped by cuts in the text approved by Bennett himself, makes sure the message is never swamped by the increasingly bizarre goings-on. There is a wonderful cameo also from Carol Macready as a meddling neighbour, who helps Connie lay out her husband in the front parlour, despite the firmest of evidence to the contrary that he is dead.