“I will not be metaphorised!” protests
Frances de la Tour’s Lady Dorothy Stacpoole just before the interval of
Alan Bennett’s new play. Too late, your ladyship; too, too late. The
problem is that Bennett never quite settles on exactly what you’re a
metaphor
for.
A particular kind of England, certainly, living alone but for your
companion in your huge, crumbling stately home; but
what kind? A way of life headed for
the knacker’s yard one way or another, either as packaged
pseudo-heritage under the National Trust, with the people of the title
traipsing around, or sold off to a private plutocratic concern to be
transported wholesale to warmer climes than Yorkshire and run as some
kind of corporate centre, or left to fend for itself in maverick ways
as Dorothy briefly does by hiring the house out as a location to a porn
film shoot which turns out not to be able to pay. But
what way of life?
A far-from-subtle speech hammers home the point that this cultural
change pivots on the 1980s, so we know vaguely what Bennett is against,
though partly because he has been against the same things for a
generation now. Dorothy and her companion keep breaking into ’60s pop
hits such as “Downtown” or “Walking Back To Happiness” (perhaps
incongruously for old gentry, although Dotty was briefly also a model),
giving a clear hint as to the era when things were better. In effect,
it is nostalgia for the age when we had never had it so good, nor ever
did again; Bennett has surprisingly become a one-nation Tory. But
again, which particulars of this age are being mourned, we have no
idea. The closest I can get is that it is in some ways a lament for the
death of discretion.
There is a clear attempt to be Chekhovian in this end-of-an-era
meditation, but Chekhov made do with one ominous offstage rumble (in
The Cherry Orchard), whereas
Bennett has the geology beneath Stacpoole Hall (or whatever it’s
called) settle loudly four or five times in two and a quarter hours of
playing time.
Bennett is one of the major assets of the National Theatre, and
Nicholas Hytner’s production attracts a commensurate cast. It is the
first time in my career that I have seen de la Tour share a stage with
her brother Andy (who plays an archbishop), and also features the
ever-glorious Linda Bassett as her companion, Selina Cadell as her
domineering lesbian archdeacon sister, Nicholas le Prevost and Miles
Jupp as the men from the (other) NT and “the Concern” respectively, and
Peter Egan as an old flame-turned-filthy-picture mogul (itself
implausible in this day and age). But it seems as if, so long as notes
are hit in the general keys of comforting Englishness and vague satire,
we no longer insist on an identifiable tune from Bennett.
Written for the Financial
Times.