The quietly desperate women (and some men) of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads series got a TV makeover this summer. The dowagers, wives and twee curtain-twitchers who first emerged in 1988 bewitched us all over again with their rueful reflections during lockdown.
What could be better than a TV reprise of an iconic series, written by a national treasure and performed by an all-star cast, to lift us out of our pandemic fug? Seeing them live, it turns out, with the same actors and directors but performed on a stage.
These monologues, directed by Nicholas Hytner, are part of the Bridge theatre’s live Talking Heads series (in which two plays are performed per night) and they manage to better their small-screen versions – just as intimate and isolated but more fluid in range and movement. The women here do not merely sit or repeatedly pour tea as they do on screen, but move across the room, leave the stage, return, become more flesh-and-blood.
In The Shrine, Monica Dolan is Lorna, who might look like a vicar’s wife but is, like many of Bennett’s cardigan-wearing women, unexpectedly anti-authority. A widow trying to come to terms with her husband’s fatal motorcycle accident, she insists on visiting the roadside verge where he perished despite warnings from the police and the church.
There is an odd timelessness to Lorna, given that this play was written in 2019 as a new addition to Talking Heads. She seems like a nostalgic creation from Bennett, with her Denby teapot and her old-fashioned outfit. But she is still an engaging character and Dolan’s performance feels both more tragic and comic than on screen.
It is helped by Luke Halls’ gorgeous video designs at the back of Bunny Christie’s set; a series of screens project Halls’ images of rain or bare branches and accentuate the melancholy poetry in Bennett’s prose, while George Fenton’s piano music saturates Dolan’s character in sorrowful solitude.
Lorna wants to keep hold of her memories of the husband she knew as Clifford, not the other secret “Cliff” who emerges after his death (“I don’t know Cliff,” she says). Alongside the pain, there are typically wry lines thrown in – when someone suggests she try counselling, Lorna bats back: “Who does that, the RAC?”
Ultimately, the play rehearses familiar ideas – about the secrets revealed when someone dies and the question of how fully we know even those to whom we feel closest – but it does so exquisitely and with such delicate sadness.
Lesley Manville is a quiet, middle-aged iconoclast in Bed Among the Lentils, a play more penetrating in its interrogations of faith, Christianity and the institution of marriage.
Manville’s Susan really is a vicar’s wife, and a bored one at that who has lost her religion. In its original 1988 incarnation, Susan was played by Maggie Smith, who gave a mournful, Bafta-nominated performance in a soft Yorkshire accent. Manville dispenses with the northern twang and appears like a frustrated wife from the Shires who questions the existence of God – sometimes openly to her husband, Geoffrey – and behaves like a middle English Madame Bovary in a pleated skirt.
Susan is painfully aware of her derailed life and marriage, having glimpsed a more vital alternative existence, and Manville conveys the bittersweetness of this knowledge, welding comedy with despair and romantic yearning. It is a subtle performance full of emotional range and Manville is such a captivating presence that, even when she forgets one line, she infuses the moment with drama.
The pairing of these monologues is a good one: they work together to supply just the right amount of uplift and light to the other’s darkness, and both Dolan and Manville are unshowy but magnificent in their parts. Bennett’s women on stage feel more real – more tragic, somehow.
Talking Heads: The Shrine & Bed Among the Lentils are at the Bridge theatre, London, until 22 September
