Scribd
Upload
202 views2 pages

People - Alan Bennett

1) The play People by Alan Bennett examines the fate of the declining Stacpoole family estate and their manor house. 2) While the play has some funny moments, it lacks the cleverness, sharp wit, and underlying affection of Bennett's previous works like The Habit of Art and The History Boys. The characters are presented as unsympathetic stereotypes. 3) The play seems to take an oddly elitist stance in ridiculing the National Trust's efforts to make heritage and history more accessible to ordinary people and focus on lesser known social histories rather than just grand estates. This is uncharacteristic of Bennett's usual targets of affectionate comedy.

Uploaded by

api-300315394
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
202 views2 pages

People - Alan Bennett

1) The play People by Alan Bennett examines the fate of the declining Stacpoole family estate and their manor house. 2) While the play has some funny moments, it lacks the cleverness, sharp wit, and underlying affection of Bennett's previous works like The Habit of Art and The History Boys. The characters are presented as unsympathetic stereotypes. 3) The play seems to take an oddly elitist stance in ridiculing the National Trust's efforts to make heritage and history more accessible to ordinary people and focus on lesser known social histories rather than just grand estates. This is uncharacteristic of Bennett's usual targets of affectionate comedy.

Uploaded by

api-300315394
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

People - Alan Bennett

I've always had a nostalgic and emotional reaction to Alan Bennett. One of the abiding memories of
my childhood is listening to Wind in the Willows on tape, narrated by Bennett, in his soft, lilting
Yorkshire tones, as a bedtime treat. The Madness of King George III, as well as being a fascinating
look into royalty and mental illness, formed the basis of a hilarious anecdote about American
confusion over missing The Madness of King George I and II, and more recently the whip-smart back
and forths on the purpose and essence of history and the issues facing historians and school boys in
The History Boys received extraordinary acclaim. His work has always picked up on issues and
subjects close to my heart, and discussed and investigated them with a cleverness, wit and subtlety
that delights.
People examines the crumbled fortunes of the Stacpoole family, and revolves around the disposal of
their final family asset, the manor house. The play reaches for a mischievous, provocative
examination of how England is preserved, pokes fun at (probably) a large proportion of its core
audience with the mantra ordinary people spoil thingsand is ultimately a disappointment.
This is not to say that the play is not enjoyable. Alan Bennett is a very funny writer, and People has
some extremely funny moments. However it lacks the sharpness, the cleverness, and most
importantly, the love, of The Habit of Art or The History Boys. In these previous plays, Bennett pokes
fun at things he clearly has a deep and abiding love for, the repartee between his characters is
punchy, eloquent and intelligent, and the cast usually share this clever, contradictory affection,
which imbues their characters with a sympathy and shrewdness which did not come across in
People. It is hard to identify with any of the characters, and they are not presented as attractive or
alluring, rather as stodgy stereotypes. Nicholas le Provosts plummy, red-trousered National Trust
apparatchik simpers and prances over-enthusiastically, inviting the audience to ridicule his jargonfuelled bureaucracy. The obsequious Bevan, played perhaps a touch hammily by Miles Jupp, turns
the stomach excellentlyuntil one realises he is being presented as one of the lesser of three evils.
Peter Egans faded pornographer, breaking and entering one moment, reminiscing charmingly of
past romance the next, was well cast, but again unsympathetic, thinking of little beyond bottoms
and the bottom line. Frances de la Tour, as the faded glamoureuse in fur and plimsolls, and Linda
Basset as her batty but penetratingly witty companion had a wonderful chemistry, but were unable
to escape from the misanthropic shackles of Dorothy Stacpooles rejection of anything that
prevented her from dying alone, undisturbed, in her family home.
The National Trust seems like an odd villain to take on, and one that lent the play an unusually elitist
feel. A faded, leather-clad razzle film producer, and an oleaginous auctioneer, fronting an even more
unsavoury international Concern are preferred to the Trust as saviours of the Stacpoole mansion
and, it seems, the Stacpooles themselves, due largely to the Trusts focus on opening up properties
and allowing people in and some ill-defined sense of dignity, shambolic, dusty and stagnant though
it may be, out. The play also mocks the Trusts focus on the unseen, the unusual, the below-stairs
stories of history, something which again does not sit well. In this Bennett seems to be raging against
a modern interpretation of heritage and national history, not of grand narrative and stately homes
but of social history, of the last childrens library in the North-East, the pit-head baths at
Featherstone and even a dirty protest cell from the Maze prison, which sound frankly fascinating. I
suppose this comes down to merely a difference of opinion, of how heritage should be treated and

history explored, but it seems disdainful and derisory, even somewhat sneering, to criticise attempts
to make a nations history more accessible and engaging and less intimidating, and to encourage
aristocratic decay, with stately homes becoming little more than mausoleums.
Bob Crowleys set, ranging delightfully from picturesque decrepitude through porno-classy to velvety
grandeur, frames a light-hearted, but ultimately insubstantial romp, picking fights which dont hold
up to scrutiny, and didnt have the foundation of affection which I have come to expect from the
usual targets of Bennetts comedy. The theatre was full of laughter, but the humour was found more
in the slapstick sub-plot of the blind bishop and the dirty movie than in the Bennetts usually barbed
satire. Linda Bassetts cackling Stacpoole love-child was a moment of genuine, warm comedy in a
production otherwise lacking the cut and thrust expected from Bennetts collaborations with Hytner
and the National.

You might also like