Lady in the Van (French's Acting Editions) - Softcover

Bennett, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0573112665 ISBN 13: 9780573112669

Publisher: Samuel French Ltd, 2006

Synopsis

Genre: Comedy

Characters: 9 males, 5 females

Scenery: Various sets

Alan Bennett draws from his memoirs to offer a dramatized account of the genteel vagrant, Miss Shepard, who parked her van in his driveway for fifteen years. Maggie Smith starred in London's West End.

"A wonderfully bittersweet comic diary of the years in which a lethally dotty and very smelly old bat parked her unroadworthy vehicle in Bennett's Camden garden, thereby providing him with roughly equal amounts of good journalistic copy and guilty landlord irritation." -Spectator

"Hilarious...A consistently enjoyable entertainment." -The New York Times

"Without doubt, the best new play of the year." -Daily Telegraph

"Bennett's writing is nimble, ironical, cruel and humane...Gives the West End one of its saddest, funniest, and most distinguished offerings for years." -London Times

About this title

Review:

Life imitates art in The Lady in the Van, the story of the itinerant Miss Shepherd, who lived in a van in Alan Bennett's driveway from the early1970s until her death in 1989. It is doubtful that Bennett could have made up the eccentric Miss Shepherd if he tried, but his poignant, funny but unsentimental account of their strange relationship is akin to his best fictional screen writing.

Bennett concedes that "One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation", but as the plastic bags build up, the years pass by and Miss Shepherd moves into Bennett's driveway, a relationship is established which defines a certain moment in late 20th-century London life which has probably gone forever. The dissenting, liberal, middle-class world of Bennett and his peers comes into hilarious but also telling collision with the world of Miss Shepherd: "there was a gap between our social position and our social obligations. It was in this gap that Miss Shepherd (in her van) was able to live".

Bennett recounts Miss Shepherd's bizarre escapades in his inimitable style, from her letter to the Argentinean Embassy at the height of the Falklands War, to her attempts to stand for Parliament and wangle an electric wheelchair out of the Social Services. Beautifully observed, The Lady in the Van is as notable for Bennett's attempts to uncover the enigmatic history of Miss Shepherd, as it is for its amusing account of her eccentric escapades. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"...a wonderfully bittersweet comic diary of the years in which a lethally dotty and very smelly old bat parked her unroadworthy vehicle in Bennett's Camden garden, thereby providing him with a roughly equal amount of good journalistic copy and guilty landlordly irritation." Sheridan Morley, Spectator"

About this edition

• Publisher: Samuel French Ltd
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0573112665
• ISBN 13: 9780573112669
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 122