FOUR STARS

"National treasure turns on National Trust in National Theatre production” would be a suitable (if rather long) headline for this review of Alan Bennett’s new play People. The writer, now 79 and with some of the curmudgeonliness proper to his age, began the work for director Nicholas Hytner after touring a Trust property and feeling uncomfortable about the role of “reverential visitor” he felt encouraged to buy into there.

His elderly heroine Lady (Dorothy) Stacpoole (Siân Phillips) feels the same. Seated in fur coat and plimsolls in a mansion as decayed as her companion Iris (Brigit Forsyth), this former model views with dismay the prospect of its passing to the Trust, as represented by its jargon-spouting agent (Michael Thomas), not least for the endowment they’ll be expecting with it. Her principal objection, though, is over the likely ‘packaging’ of her family history.

It seems, perhaps, that this fate might be avoided through a deal with spivvy Mr Fixit (Simon Bubb), who envisages a future for the house in a location far removed from its present precarious position beside a coal mine.

Another prospect for its survival is as a long-term setting for pornographic films, the first of which we see being shot under the supervision of Theodore (Paul Moriarty), an old mate from Dorothy’s modelling days.

The arrival of Lady Stacpoole’s fierce archdeacon sister June (Selina Cadell) midway through the action — stars Alexander Warner and Ellie Burrow — is a comic highlight of the play, not least because she happens to be with her silly-ass bishop (Robin Bowerman).

Other laughs, for me at any rate, come in rather shorter supply. I was more puzzled than tickled, for example, by the peculiar comic conceit of a collection of chamber pots containing urine passed by Kipling, Hardy and other noted visitors to the house. Has Bennett never heard of evaporation?

 

Milton Keynes Theatre
Until Saturday
Tickets: 0844 8717652 , atgtickets.com/miltonkeynes