Her Big Chance - A monologue from Talking Heads

by Alan Bennett

Meet Lesley, an actress. She has just completed a video ('targeted chiefly on West Germany') in which she plays Travis, a career girl who enjoys life, spends a remarkable amount of time topless and shoots a man with a harpoon gun. She tells all, blind to the sinister undertones of her story as well as to her own self-delusions and gullibility.

Genres: British Literature, Fiction, Comedy

Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Alan Bennett is an English author and Tony Award-winning playwright. Bennett's first stage play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio plays followed, along with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose and broadcasting, and many appearances as an actor. Bennett's lugubrious yet expressive voice (which still bears a slight Leeds accent) and the sharp humour and evident humanity of his writing have made his readings of his own work (especially his autobiographical writing) very popular. His readings of the Winnie the Pooh stories are also widely enjoyed.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another 5-star read from Alan Bennett. The actress in this monologue has never achieved any measure of success, but she keeps on trucking - that big part is just around the corner.

She relates the jobs she has done, parts she hasn't got, what she has been asked to do in a very serious way, but it is funny to us, the audience. She obviously can't act, isn't a babe and has a big mouth and never thinks before she speaks. She says the wrong things to the right people time and again thinking she is giving them good advice. Oh dear, she's a train wreck, but a trier.

After I read the play (aloud in parts, I like to do that with Bennett and put on my fake-sounding Northern accent, but I'm alone, so it's not embarrassing) I watched the Youtube video with Julie Walters, for whom Bennett actually wrote the monologue. She's brilliant. As an amazingly good actress playing a really bad, failed one, she's utterly believable. I loved how she brought the words to life. Also her accent is real, she's from (nearly) up North.

Finished Jan. 2015

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not 1 of Bennett's best as the dumb actress with pretensions is an easy target.