Alan Bennett Plays 2

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571250718
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
This second volume of plays by Alan Bennett includes his two Kafka plays, one an hilarious comedy, the other a profound and searching drama. Also included is An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. The fascination of these two plays lies in the way they question our accepted notions of treachery and, in different ways, make a sympathetic case for Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

Allelujah!

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571349862
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Book Description
- What were you in life?- In life, as you put it, I was a schoolmaster. The Beth, an old fashioned cradle-to-grave hospital serving a town on the edge of the Pennines, is threatened with closure as part of an NHS efficiency drive. As Dr Valentine and Sister Gilchrist attend to the patients, a documentary crew, eager to capture its fight for survival, follows the daily struggle to find beds on the Dusty Springfield Geriatric Ward. Meanwhile, the old people's choir, in readiness for next week's concert, is in full swing, augmented by the arrival of Mrs Maudsley, aka Pudsey Nightingale. Alan Bennett's Allelujah! opened at the Bridge Theatre, London, in July 2018. With an introduction by Alan Bennett.

Keeping On Keeping On

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374716978
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 680

Book Description
One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year: “Humorous, surprising, disarmingly human” essays and comic pieces from one of England’s national treasures (The Washington Post Book World). A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year A Lambda Literary Award finalist Bringing together the hilarious, revealing, and lucidly intelligent writing of one of England’s best-known literary figures, Keeping On Keeping On contains Tony Award–winning playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and actor Alan Bennett’s diaries from 2005 to 2015—with everything from his much celebrated essays to his irreverent comic pieces and reviews—reflecting on a decade that saw four major theater premieres and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. This entertaining chronicle of a life in letters comes from a “singular voice [with] a highly tuned ironic wit—his special brand of gentleness laced with arsenic” (The New York Times Book Review). “Part of the pleasure of his diaries is the sense that [Bennett] tells them things he would never say out loud.” —The New York Review of Books “Consistently funny and touching.” —The Telegraph

The Uncommon Reader

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429934530
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
From one of England's most celebrated writers, a funny and superbly observed novella about the Queen of England and the subversive power of reading When her corgis stray into a mobile library parked near Buckingham Palace, the Queen feels duty-bound to borrow a book. Discovering the joy of reading widely (from J. R. Ackerley, Jean Genet, and Ivy Compton-Burnett to the classics) and intelligently, she finds that her view of the world changes dramatically. Abetted in her newfound obsession by Norman, a young man from the royal kitchens, the Queen comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with the routines of her role as monarch. Her new passion for reading initially alarms the palace staff and soon leads to surprising and very funny consequences for the country at large. With the poignant and mischievous wit of The History Boys, England's best loved author Alan Bennett revels in the power of literature to change even the most uncommon reader's life.

Getting on

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Samuel French Limited
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Book Description
A British Labour M.P., ten years into his second marriage, feels tethered in a time of change. He is distrustful on the one hand of the "mawkish mentality" of the young and, on the other, of the encroaching motorway life of the middle aged who can look forward to nothing more than the fairly imminent end of a not so very interesting road. "The play is a small jewel of bewilderment and regret." - London Sunday Times

Untold Stories

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571246893
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 820

Book Description
Alan Bennett's first collection of prose since Writing Home takes in all his major writings over the last ten years. The title piece is a poignant family memoir with an account of the marriage of his parents, the lives and deaths of his aunts and the uncovering of a long-held family secret. Bennett, as always, is both amusing and poignant, whether he's discussing his modest childhood or his work with the likes of Maggie Smith, Thora Hird and John Gielgud. Also included are his much celebrated diaries for the years 1996 to 2004. At times heartrending and at others extremely funny, Untold Stories is a matchless and unforgettable anthology. Since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s Alan Bennett has delighted audiences worldwide with his gentle humour and wry observations about life. His many works include Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, Talking Heads, A Question of Attribution and The Madness of King George. The History Boys opened to great acclaim at the National in 2004, and is winner of the Evening Standard Award, the South Bank Award and the Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play. 'Perhaps the best loved of English writers alive today.' Sunday Telegraph Untold Stories is published jointly with Profile Books.

The Complete Talking Heads

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312423087
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
Two series of monologues written for BBC television and broadcast in 1988 and 1998, along with 'A woman of no importance', an earlier monologue first televised in 1982.

The Lady in the Van

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9781781255407
Category : Eccentrics and eccentricities
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
Film tie in edition of Alan Bennett's classic memoir. For fifteen years, the recalcitrant Miss Shepherd lived in her broken-down van on Alan Bennett's driveway in Camden. Deeply eccentric and stubborn to her bones, Miss Shepherd was not an easy tenant. Bennett, despite inviting her in the first place, was a reluctant landlord, never under the illusion that his impulse was purely charitable. This account of those years was first published in 1989 in the London Review of Books. The play premiered in 1999, direct by Nicholas Hytner and starring Dame Maggie Smith, who reprise those roles in this new film adaptation. Shot on location at Bennett's house, Alex Jennings plays the author, alongside household names including James Corden, Frances de la Tour, Jim Broadbent and Dominic Cooper.

Talking Heads

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 184607259X
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Alan Bennett sealed his reputation as an acute observer of British life with a series of six monologues. At once darkly comic, tragically poignant and wonderfully uplifting, these modern-day classics invite us to explore 12 very different but very real characters and their lives.

The Habit of Art

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429978333
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 113

Book Description
Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W. H. Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first in twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by, among others, their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station. Alan Bennett's new play is as much about the theater as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion's spent: ultimately, on the habit of art.