London Theater Journal: Alan Bennett, a Cozy Everywhere Man

Jayne West Alex Jennings in “Cocktail Sticks.”

Dead celebrity theater has long been a staple of the English-speaking stage. In New York these days, you can’t turn a corner off Times Square without coming across some esteemed performer pretending to be Ann Richards or Sue Mengers or even the tabloid columnist Mike McClary. But London, at the moment, likes ‘em live.

Two of the most cherished tickets in town are to shows about beloved Britons who are very much still with us and whose local sentimental value ranks up there with non-human institutions like Big Ben and beans on toast. Most obviously, I am referring to a certain reigning monarch being portrayed by Helen Mirren in Peter Morgan’s “Audience.”

But I am also talking about Alan Bennett, the best-selling writer and oft-performed dramatist. Mr. Bennett is being portrayed at the National Theater by Alex Jennings, whom I last saw (also at the National) as the dead Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov and before that as the dead composer Benjamin Britten in “The Habit of Art,” a play by Mr. Bennett.

Now Mr. Jennings is appearing in a double bill of short autobiographical pieces by Mr. Bennett: “Hymn” and “Cocktail Sticks,” which transfers to the West End later this month as “Untold Stories.” These are not to be confused with another popular play at the National called “People,” which was written by Mr. Bennett but in which he doe! s not appear as a character or an actor.

As it happens, the first time I saw Mr. Bennett (I mean the real Mr. Bennett, not an impersonator) was in a play (by Mr. Bennett) called “A Question of Attribution.” This was essentially an extended dialogue between his character (the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt) and Queen Elizabeth II (an impersonator in this case: the actress Prunella Scales). That was some 20 years ago.

Since then, Mr. Bennett has refused a knighthood and written a short, affectionate comic novel about the Queen, “The Uncommon Reader,” in which Mr. Bennett fantasizes about Her Majesty’s awakening literary appetite. And I eagerly await the day when I can see a play about an imagined meeting between the Queen and Mr. Bennett, in which they laugh and laugh about their fictional alter-egos. Ms. Mirren, of course, would play Elizabeth. And having seen Mr. Jennings in “Hymn” an “Cocktail Sticks,” I have no problem at all with his reprising Mr. Bennett.

They might well discover they have much in common. Though the origins of Mr. Bennett, a son of a butcher, and the Queen, a daughter of Empire, are far apart, they have come to hold not dissimilar places in the hearts of their publics. This is partly because they are both long-lived and continue to execute their respective occupations in good form, which is deeply reassuring to mortality-fearing mortals.

They are also each as cozy as a hot water bottle, which is to say warming in an old-fashioned, homey way. They make the heights they occupy - societal in her case, intellectual in his - feel like the ground floor of a parlor that we all we can step into, if only in our minds.

And despite the exposure afforded by his writing and her being, you know, the Queen, they remain essentially private people. This, too, is comforting in an age in which we know all too much about the sexual, spending and cosmetic ha! bits of t! he famous, who make up an increasingly large portion of the world’s population.

The manner in which Mr. Bennett embodies this appeal is very much in evidence in “Hymn” and “Cocktail Sticks,” tales of life with his Mam and Dad in northern England. The 30-minute “Hymn,” directed by Nadia Fall, finds Mr. Jennings as Mr. Bennett reflecting on the role music played in his life when he was a boy in Leeds.

Mr. Jennings shares the stage with a string quartet, playing music by George Fenton that captures time past in memories of things heard: concerts on the radio and at the local hall, his father’s amateur violin playing and the hymns that Mr. Bennett learned by heart as a schoolboy and that could, when he sang them with others, make him believe that he belonged to a culture in which he otherwise always felt an outsider.

The roots of this sense of not belonging are traced in “Cocktail Sticks,” in which Mr. Bennett’s parents appear, portrayed by Gabrielle Lloyd and Jeff Rawle.They were not a sociable pair, though Mam would have liked to have been and fantasized about giving cocktail parties like the ones she read about in magazines at the hairdresser’s.

Mr. Bennett, who went on to Oxford University and youthful fame as a member of “Beyond the Fringe” revue, confesses that he was ashamed of his parents when he was a student, and ashamed of his shame. Yet as success took him to the West End and Broadway, where glittering people abounded, he remained defined by - and ultimately an inhabitant of - his parents’ world.

This is affectingly conveyed by the conversations that Mr. Bennett (or rather Mr. Jennings as Mr. Bennett) continues to conduct with his parents onstage in “Cocktail Sticks,” directed by Nicholas Hytner. Pretty much anyone with parents is likely to identify with Alan Bennett here. Yet for all that he reveals with such specificity about growing up, he remains just slightly mysterious, ! as a fond! , eccentric and quiet bachelor uncle might appear to a curious child.

There is no Alan Bennett character in “People,” also directed by Mr. Hytner, which sometimes feels less like a play by Mr. Bennett than a ready-made imitation of one. The story of an outré aristocrat (Frances de la Tour) living on in a splendid but decaying family pile, “People” includes witty and sometimes lyrical Bennett-esque observations on the state of a nation as reflected by the state of a house.

Dorothy Stacpoole (Ms. De la Tour), a former couture model and the oldest survivor of her ancient family tree, is being courted by both private interests and the National Trust, which longs to turn her home into a museum. Other characters include Dorothy’s devoted, cronelike companion (Linda Bassett); Dorothy’s entrepreneurial sister (Selina Cadell), a butch vicar; and a mystery man from Dorothy’s distant past (Peter Egan), who shows up to make pornographic movies.

The play’s mix of low humor, improbable onvergences, topical reference and zingy epigrams often feels contrived in the manner of a 1980s television Brit com, all situation and little credible substance. But it has been given a deluxe production (the designer is Bob Crowley) that includes an on-site renovation of the rotting house and the not-to-be-sneezed at vision of the formidable Ms. de la Tour in both aristo-rags and haute couture.

Mr. Bennett, as you might expect, also provides clever and quotable lines on a country that turns its history into cash cows. The show will be broadcast in movie theaters on March 21 and May 16, as part of the National Theater Live series, and one can imagine its perhaps seeming more at home on a screen. And while it features a few bare bottoms and off-color double entendres, it is a show you could take Mam and Dad to without feeling at all ashamed.