Alan Bennett
The Wind in the Willows, London Palladium review - an effortful slogFriday, 30 June 2017
An enormous amount rides on a musical's opening number. Without explicitly expressing it, a good opener sets tone, mood and style. Take The Lion King, where "Circle of Life" so thrillingly unites music, design and direction that nothing that follows... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Long ShotFriday, 30 June 2017
Maurice Hatton’s 1978 Long Shot comes with the subtitle “A film about filmmaking”, a nod at what has practically become a cinematic sub-category in itself. But while other directors have used the genre for philosophical or aesthetic rumination,... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Alan Bennett - Keeping On Keeping OnSunday, 23 October 2016
To settle down on a darkening evening with a new volume of Alan Bennett is to be in the company of an old friend. Someone you don’t see as often as you’d like but with whom you immediately pick up where you left off. Midnight will come and go and... Read more... |
The Lady in the VanFriday, 13 November 2015
Maggie Smith is in her element as Miss S in the film version of Alan Bennett's 1999 play The Lady in the Van, her partnership with the playwright-actor one of the defining components of the storied career of the octogenarian dame, whose renown has... Read more... |
Maggie Smith: 'If there’s an old bat to play, it’ll be me'Sunday, 08 November 2015
Maggie Smith rarely gives interviews. In the week that Downton Abbey's last-ever series episode is broadcast, and she reprises on screen her role in Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van (pictured below with Alex Jennings), theartsdesk revisits an... Read more... |
Single Spies, Rose Theatre, KingstonThursday, 02 October 2014
Alan Bennett’s 80th birthday last May deserves celebrating not just as a point of respect for a formidable playwright but with awe at his continuing liveliness. More than 40 years after 40 Years On, he is still producing hits, and at Kingston’s Rose... Read more... |
Live from the National Theatre: 50 Years on Stage, BBC TwoSunday, 03 November 2013
These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right... Read more... |
Hymn/Cocktail Sticks, National TheatreMonday, 17 December 2012
“You don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.” It’s a maxim that has guided a writing career that, insect-like, has made itself at home among the lived detritus of autobiography and memoir. In Alan Bennett’s 2001 Hymn and his... Read more... |
People, National TheatreThursday, 08 November 2012
The word “people” of the title of Alan Bennett’s new play is to be spat out, like a lemon pip. People, who invade your space, boss your values, make you be what they want. So does the beleaguered Lady Dorothy Stacpoole feel about the stark options... Read more... |
The Madness of George III, Apollo TheatreTuesday, 24 January 2012
Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III has enjoyed something of a royal progress around England over the past year. Touring in Christopher Luscombe’s slick production for the Peter Hall Company, the show has finally arrived in the West End. The... Read more... |
Alan Bennett and The Habit of Art, More4Saturday, 27 November 2010
Few theatrical collaborations have been as successful as that achieved over five plays, two films, several decades, and numerous awards by the playwright Alan Bennett and the director Nicholas Hytner, who had jointly made a habit of art well before... Read more... |
The Habit of Art, National TheatreWednesday, 18 November 2009
It sounded a dry subject and a dry title for Alan Bennett’s first play for five years - a fictional meeting between composer Benjamin Britten and poet W H Auden 25 years after they fell out, two old buggers, one furtive, the other extrovert. But at... Read more... |
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