Nicholas Hytner (2015)
The BFI screening of Sunday Bloody Sunday, which Sally and I went to the evening before I saw The Lady in the Van, included a post-film Q&A with Glenda Jackson. We didn’t see this out but stayed long enough to hear Jackson commend John Schlesinger’s film for the extensive conversations between the main characters. These, Jackson said, would be impossible nowadays, when ‘you’d have to have a car bursting into flame every few minutes’. This got an appreciative titter in NFT3 but made me think Glenda Jackson should pick more carefully what she sees at the cinema – and try movies like Brooklyn, The End of the Tour, Far from the Madding Crowd, 45 Years, The Lobster, London Road, The Measure of a Man and Taxi. These are just the better releases so far in 2015 in which there’s plenty of interesting dialogue and human interaction and an absence of burning vehicles.
There’s so much talk in The Lady in the Van that you feel it could do with a few cars on fire. Or even an exploding van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, an elderly eccentric whose mobile home, a Bedford van, stayed put in the drive of Alan Bennett’s home in Gloucester Crescent, Camden for fifteen years. In the course of the film, we discover that Miss Shepherd’s real name was Margaret Fairchild and that she was, in her youth, a gifted pianist and once played Chopin at the Proms. After trying and failing to become a nun, she was committed by her brother to a mental institution, from which she escaped. Driving the van she’d acquired, she was involved in a road accident in which a motorcyclist was killed. Miss Shepherd, although she wasn’t to blame for the accident, lived from then on in fear of arrest – and in the van. She went regularly to church to pray for forgiveness. Alan Bennett first got to know Miss Shepherd in the mid-1970s. He initially, and reluctantly, agreed to her parking her van in his drive as a temporary arrangement. The arrangement continued until his guest’s final illness and death in 1989.
The Lady in the Van began life that same year, as a piece by Bennett in the London Review of Books. It became a play on the London stage ten years later and, a decade after that, a radio play. Bennett did the adaptations for the theatre and for radio, and has now written the screen version. Nicholas Hytner, who directed the stage play, directs the film. Maggie Smith plays the title role, as she did in the theatre and on radio. I dreaded seeing The Lady in the Van. Hytner isn’t a natural film-maker; and the slender material is, by now, too familiar to him, to Bennett and to Maggie Smith. To be fair to Hytner, though, the start of the film took me by surprise. (In fact, it comes close to vehicular conflagration: maybe Glenda Jackson walked out.) Here, as so often in what follows, soundtrack dominates image but what we hear at the beginning isn’t words. A black screen is accompanied by the sound of a motor engine, getting gradually louder, followed by a horrified yell and a thudding crash. The first pictures on screen are of a van driving away from a motorcycle and the body of its rider in the road. Inside the van is Miss Shepherd, looking considerably younger and less dilapidated than we know – from the poster and trailer for the film – she’s going to look in due course. The van gives the slip to a pursuing police car.
Once this brief ‘cinematic’ concession is done with, Nicholas Hytner reverts largely to form but there is one major change from his theatre production. The Lady in the Van is essentially two two-handers: between Bennett and Miss Shepherd; and between Bennett the writer and his conscience. On stage, these two Alan Bennetts had to be two different actors; on screen, Alex Jennings plays both aspects of Bennett. The film also includes loads of minor characters. These include Bennett’s mother; his neighbours in Gloucester Crescent; a social worker; and the policeman who vainly chased Miss Shepherd after the road accident and who, many years later, spends his retirement blackmailing her. (I didn’t get how he managed to track her down.) Even with Jim Broadbent playing the bent copper, this is a particularly feeble subplot. Running it a close second are Miss Shepherd’s occasional visits to Broadstairs and her brother (David Calder), whose wife won’t have her in the house. These bits are perfunctory: it’s as if Bennett and Hytner, every so often, remind themselves that they have to open out the material because this is a movie.
Most of the supporting characters are satirised predictably though one or two of the actors – like Roger Allam and Frances de la Tour, who are among the Gloucester Crescent residents – manage to give their tired characters a spark of individuality. (The only time I nearly laughed came when Allam, at Miss Shepherd’s funeral, looks at the hearse and drily pronounces it ‘a cut above her last vehicle’.) As Bennett, Alex Jennings, in a skilful but self-conscious piece of mimicry, wears a set expression of rueful exasperation. Although her portrait of Miss Shepherd shows signs of having been worked out long ago, Maggie Smith keeps reminding you that she was a superb actress before she congealed into isn’t-she-priceless Dame Maggie. The naturally disputatious quality that she gives the character has bite. Hytner and Bennett have also provided Smith with an effective sentimental climax, as the elderly Miss Shepherd plays the piano one last time. On the whole, though, Maggie Smith’s mannered adorability puts the tragicomedy of Miss Shepherd’s existence in quotation marks, and at a safe distance. Alan Bennett is appalled by his uninvited guest’s lack of hygiene and her toilet habits. He remarks at one point ‘there’s a lot about shit’ in what he writes about her. But when, late on in the story, he notes with admiration that an ambulance man ‘doesn’t flinch’ in close proximity to Miss Shepherd, the observation seems pointless: no one else in the story has flinched either. Besides, Maggie Smith is in such good odour with the audiences at which The Lady in the Van is aimed that she entirely expels the insalubrious aspects of Miss Shepherd.
Watching the film was, for the most part, as gruesome as I’d feared. I feel less badly disposed towards it in retrospect, not because it’s good – it isn’t – but because it has the quality of an affectionate tribute to Alan Bennett. Many actors who’ve been involved before in his work, on stage or screen, have cameos in The Lady in the Van, including the entire Oxbridge class of The History Boys. Near the end, Bennett himself appears briefly: he gets off his bike and is greeted warmly by members of the Lady in the Van film crew. There’s a sad charm to this moment for anyone who’s enjoyed Alan Bennett – the public personality and his work – over the decades. It seems that Bennett is happier in old age than he was as a young or middle-aged man. This may be a consequence of his seeing most of the last twenty of his eighty years as an unexpected bonus. (In 1997, he was diagnosed with cancer: the prognosis was poor but the disease went into remission.) It’s almost certainly a consequence of contentment in his personal life, with his much younger partner, Rupert Thomas. But for those of us who once really admired Bennett’s writing, it’s sad too that his work now does little more than reinforce a public image that has grown stale. Bennett has noted, with some pride, that, unlike plenty of writers, he’s got more left-wing with age yet he’s increasingly happy to reinforce his popularity with middle England. He has allegedly turned down a knighthood but he appears to be very aware of being, like Maggie Smith, a national treasure.
In The Lady in the Van, his mild, obvious lampoons of well-heeled denizens of Camden, social workers et al are, by now, second nature but this going through the motions is itself innocuous. It doesn’t matter too much either when Bennett distorts theatre history to fit our idea of him as wryly, resignedly defeated. There’s a bit in the film that shows Alex Jennings performing the monologue A Chip in the Sugar on stage and we’re given to understand that the play was poorly received. (The monologue had already been admired on television in 1988, as part of Talking Heads. Bennett won an Olivier Award for Best Actor when he recreated it on stage in 1992.) What matters more, I think, is the subplot in The Lady in the Van concerning Bennett’s mother Lillian, and her increasing dementia. Bennett has acknowledged that plenty of his female characters over the years were inspired by Lillian. Her recognition of this – ‘By, I’ve given you some script’ – has been quoted by Bennett before. The line turns up again in The Lady in the Van, during a telephone conversation between Mrs Bennett and Alan, and it sounds like a quotation.
This is partly because of Nicholas Hytner’s phony staging, partly because Gwen Taylor, although technically the right age to play Mrs Bennett, is altogether too with it in the role: her intimations of declining mental powers are tightly theatrical. It was another of Taylor’s scenes that I found much worse, though; it was the conception rather than the playing of this that seemed offensively crude and insensitive. Bennett’s mother is about to travel back to Yorkshire after a visit to London. A black cab arrives outside the house in Gloucester Crescent, Mrs Bennett gets into it, her son says ‘Kings Cross’ to the driver, and she’s on her way. Perhaps my memory’s going too but, as I remember Bennett’s parents from his earlier autobiographical writings, they found it very challenging to go on holiday or venture away from home at all. The cursory dispatch of Mam in the film – not even seeing her onto her train at Kings Cross – dislocated and degraded my idea of this mother-son relationship. The only consolation is that Miss Shepherd also thinks Bennett is insufficiently attentive. After he returns from a visit up north, she asks how his mother is. Bennett says, with reference to the worsening dementia, ‘She doesn’t know who I am’. Miss Shepherd tartly replies, ‘I’m not surprised – she never sees you’.
26 November 2015
