When Alan Bennett offered the temporary use of his drive to a homeless woman in the 1970s, she parked her battered van outside his front door and stayed for 15 years. Already the subject of a memoir and a play, Miss Mary (or perhaps Margaret?) Shepherd now comes to our screens courtesy of Maggie Smith, who starred in the award-winning 1999 stage production. Smith is magnificent as the fearsomely opinionated interloper who left Camden residents torn between liberal middle-class guilt and baser territorial horror. “One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation,” says Bennett.
Yet amid all the dictatorial ravings (“I’m a busy woman!”), divine delusions (“I’ve had guidance from the Virgin Mary”) and unsanitary lavatory habits (stout plastic bags, apparently), Miss Shepherd emerges from this wonderfully warm-hearted romp as a perversely lovable and profoundly poignant figure, albeit utterly cantankerous.
Having come a cropper with his screen adaptation of The History Boys in 2006, director Nicholas Hytner here hits the high notes that distinguished his 1994 stage-to-screen triumph The Madness of King George. With Alex Jennings pitch-perfect in the bifurcated dual role of Bennett (one half writes, one half lives, both bicker), The Lady in the Van taps into the author’s anxieties about his distant, ailing mother while still wringing uproarious laughs from her vagabond stand-in’s misbehaviour. Delightful supporting turns from Roger Allam and Frances de la Tour add breezy charm, but we never lose sight of the underlying sadness (mixed with something more sinister) that haunts Miss Shepherd’s past. Bravo!
