Alan Bennett’s stage adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’ is featuring as the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Christmas production, opening later this month. Bennett’s reworking of the family favourite originally ran in 1991, and has been regularly staged in theatres around the country ever since.
Born in 1934 in Leeds, Bennett has long been a household name for many. Having studied at Oxford University, he stayed there after completing his degree intending to pursue a career in academia. However when the opportunity arose, Bennett found himself as one quarter of the cast for ‘Beyond the Fringe’, a stage revue first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre as part of the 1960 Edinburgh Festival. Along with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, Bennett performed the sketches in the West End and on Broadway throughout the 60’s. The show was one of the first to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain’s office that portrayed a living politician in a satirical light. It was this light-hearted fun poking at then-Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that led to a ‘satire boom’ that Bennett is so often credited with.
After finding fame with ‘Beyond the Fringe’, Bennett moved from teaching at Oxford to writing full-time, and his first full-length play was performed in the West End in 1968. ‘Forty Years On’, which Bennett himself describes as ‘an elaborate life-support system for the preservation of bad jokes’, is a half-play half-revue satirising a typically English boarding school. Damian Cruden, the director of York’s Theatre Royal’s most recent run of the play describes how Bennett’s work ‘still raises relevant questions for a contemporary audience. Just what is it to be English now?’
This continuing relevance is one of the major attractions of Bennett’s work, and one of the contributing factors to his long and successful career as an actor, author and playwright. The theme of education endures throughout Bennett’s work, most famously returning in the form of hugely critically-acclaimed play ‘The History Boys’, which premiered in 2004. Although undeniably a work of fiction, Bennett does admit that some of his own experiences at grammar school in Leeds and reading History as Oxford did help to shape certain characters within the play. Although the play contains the typical classroom caricatures: Dakin, confident and good-looking but mortified at pronouncing ‘Nietzsche’ wrong in front of his teacher; Timms, the chubby class clown who ends up owner of a dry-cleaning chain; Posner, the shy, quiet outsider who is struggling to come to terms with his feelings for Dakin. Above these caricatures, Bennett manages to combine a play that is both hilariously witty, and highly moving.
Bennett’s balance of humour and emotional depth is something that he has become renowned for, and at the age of 78 with his newest play, ‘People’, being described as ‘mordantly funny’ in the Guardian’s review, it is no surprise he is so frequently described as a national treasure.
Isabel Alderson Blench