Nicholas Hytner’s nimble response to the pandemic was to revive Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues of 1988 and 1998, first for the BBC and now for his theatre where eight of the short plays are being performed in pairs.
In the first of these Monica Dolan and then Lesley Manville deliver mesmerising portraits of women in discreet crisis. The calm with which Dolan’s Lorna sits at her kitchen table pouring belies grief; the contempt with which Manville’s vicar’s wife speaks of her fellow female parishioners reveals a seething anger.
Early in in the first play it emerges that Lorna’s husband Clifford was killed when crashing his motorbike on a country lane during one of his birdwatching trips. Her visits to the scene are more an attempt to understand her own absence of emotion than to pay tribute to the man who she loved very deeply.
The sheep may have witnessed the accident that the police, she notes, insist on calling an incident. The place is “nowhere” she observes. “But him dying there has made it a real place.”
It could be argued that Lorna’s monologue — one of two new Talking Heads Bennett wrote in 2019— is too similar to be paired with Manville’s Susan, the vicar’s wife. Both are highly respectable women who tilt against the small-c conservative conventions that they are expected to live by.
Yet a Venn diagram of these lives — both of the live directed by Hytner —would reveal crucial and complimentary differences. And each keep you close and engaged with an undertow of intrigue and with clues to hidden lives.
Susan is the more cynical of the two. She is also brimful of bitterness for devoting her life to the clergy and a husband who she strongly suspects does not believe in God. In Lorna’s case there are the flowers someone else placed at the scene of the accident and the extra motorcycle helmet that was found with Clifford’s body. But this is Bennett. There is no heightened drama of carpet-chewing betrayal. And if there were it would say no more about Lorna than the incidental fact that she has turned both helmets into hanging baskets.
In Susan’s case transgressions are suggested by the missing communion wine, and the shop in Leeds where the Indian shopkeeper is everything her epically patronising husband Geoffrey isn’t. The transgression that made one audience gasp was not his race, or the adultery, but the male lovers age of 26.
Manville and Dolan are in total command of Bennett’s studies in solitude. Beyond these two the season was always an–– unlikely prospect. It is hard to imagine all eight works being performed with a cast including the likes of Imelda Staunton, Tamsin Grieg and Kristin Scott Thomas among others, had actors’ diaries not been simultaneously decimated by the pandemic. The result is very special indeed.
