So maybe I'll see you there
Last night I got to see the NT* broadcast of People, Alan Bennett's new play.
Lady Dorothy Stacpoole, the redoubtable Frances de la Tour in a rumpsprung, motheaten mink and wellingtons, crouches in her mouldering stately home in South Yorkshire, surrounded by abandoned coal mines, and shuddering with earthquakes. It will never quite tip into the abyss. It is everything I've dealt with in the last three years, only grander and crazier--at least I don't have a closet full of archival pisspots with the dregs of luminaries' urine. Or Henry VIII's rosary mended with a luggage tag. Or a cat bowl worth a continent. (More's the pity.) The house is bloody cold, unplumbed, torrentially leaky—there's a hipbath on the billiard table, catching the downpour-—and rotting away. Dot's sister, a bossy archdeacon, with a channel-swimming girlfriend named Guthrie ("Still breasting the billows?"), wants to give it to the National Trust and be done with it. Dotty loathes the idea of being prettified into Heritage, of being on exhibit to the hordes of people tramping through. She wants to die there; she wants to sell the damned stuff for a mess of pottage and an en suite bathroom. Her companion Iris--a little goblin-backed woman in a shapeless cardigan--knits and comments. She has the full moon's pie-faced innocence (if the old moon wore barrettes in his wispy hair). She's a little simple; she's piercingly straightforward; she's something more than a companion: half servant, half sister. Sometimes she and Dotty sing old pop songs together, and dance with abandon.
They are visited by a smarmy auctioneer, by a blithering NT** liaison, and by a porn film crew that wants a poster bed. (And at the crucial moment, by a shortsighted bishop.) That last group are revivifying. They're kind: the costume girl gives the ladies lotion and shampoo; the nice gay grip (who adores Dotty's old Schiaparellis and Balenciagas) fixes the boiler. Bath time! Bliss! She takes to swanning about in her vintage outfits. Iris is enraptured when the star drops his trousers, amazed as any baby at a jack-in-the-box.
It's not a perfect play. It's lopsided. Some of satire slaps too hard; some of the bubbles don't break from the pipe but froth a little and splutter. But O! what effortless Englishry! What mastery of jackstraw conversation, all at angles to itself--tangential, fragile, acerbic. What characters! What quirks!
And the actors--above all, the silly sisters, Dotty and Iris--are magnificent.
Nine
*National Theatre
**National Trust
Lady Dorothy Stacpoole, the redoubtable Frances de la Tour in a rumpsprung, motheaten mink and wellingtons, crouches in her mouldering stately home in South Yorkshire, surrounded by abandoned coal mines, and shuddering with earthquakes. It will never quite tip into the abyss. It is everything I've dealt with in the last three years, only grander and crazier--at least I don't have a closet full of archival pisspots with the dregs of luminaries' urine. Or Henry VIII's rosary mended with a luggage tag. Or a cat bowl worth a continent. (More's the pity.) The house is bloody cold, unplumbed, torrentially leaky—there's a hipbath on the billiard table, catching the downpour-—and rotting away. Dot's sister, a bossy archdeacon, with a channel-swimming girlfriend named Guthrie ("Still breasting the billows?"), wants to give it to the National Trust and be done with it. Dotty loathes the idea of being prettified into Heritage, of being on exhibit to the hordes of people tramping through. She wants to die there; she wants to sell the damned stuff for a mess of pottage and an en suite bathroom. Her companion Iris--a little goblin-backed woman in a shapeless cardigan--knits and comments. She has the full moon's pie-faced innocence (if the old moon wore barrettes in his wispy hair). She's a little simple; she's piercingly straightforward; she's something more than a companion: half servant, half sister. Sometimes she and Dotty sing old pop songs together, and dance with abandon.
They are visited by a smarmy auctioneer, by a blithering NT** liaison, and by a porn film crew that wants a poster bed. (And at the crucial moment, by a shortsighted bishop.) That last group are revivifying. They're kind: the costume girl gives the ladies lotion and shampoo; the nice gay grip (who adores Dotty's old Schiaparellis and Balenciagas) fixes the boiler. Bath time! Bliss! She takes to swanning about in her vintage outfits. Iris is enraptured when the star drops his trousers, amazed as any baby at a jack-in-the-box.
It's not a perfect play. It's lopsided. Some of satire slaps too hard; some of the bubbles don't break from the pipe but froth a little and splutter. But O! what effortless Englishry! What mastery of jackstraw conversation, all at angles to itself--tangential, fragile, acerbic. What characters! What quirks!
And the actors--above all, the silly sisters, Dotty and Iris--are magnificent.
Nine
*National Theatre
**National Trust
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