Don’t fall for the Hovis and snobbery act, Alan Bennett is not only one of our greatest living writers but he’s also British theatre’s most experimental and structurally reflexive major playwright. Attacking the conventions of dramatic form with a robust and witty scepticism, he consistently engages with the most vital questions raised by the creation and construction of the art-form. The Lady in the Van belies its cosy Camden setting and its anecdotal jumping point to stage a viciously funny interrogation of the guilty game of transforming life into art.
Bennett waited 10 years to bring the strange tale of Miss Shepherd to the stage; that titular lady who pulled into town in the dying years of the 1960s in a battered yellow van, who moved into the writer’s garden and stayed there until her death 15 years later. The story had already been mined for a warm but cautious essay, and the stage version followed on the heels of a radio dramatisation. Bennett’s superb play, which is given an immaculate presentation by Hull Truck Theatre, is a powerful self-confrontation, in which two Alan Bennetts debate their motives in housing the beatific vagrant and the moral rectitude of transforming this act of charity into art. Miss Shepherd was undoubtedly grist for the mill, but she was such perfect grist, such a gift to a writer like Bennett, that the mill comes close to tearing itself apart.
Sketching in the 15 years from Miss Shepherd’s arrival in a van to her departure in a hearse, The Lady in the Van is as much a portrait of Bennett as his hygienically challenged visitor. While Sean McKenzie plays one Alan Bennett, the young and painfully English bachelor who accepts the addition to his garden with quiet toleration, Paul Kemp embodies Bennett the writer, gleefully anticipating the story, the book, and the play which the unfolding action will inspire. More complex than a simple division into good and evil, the two identically dressed Alans co-exist in a squabbling reciprocity of moral and ethical relativism.
Both McKenzie and Kemp are excellent and deliver very different versions of their author. Where Kemp displays a pitch-perfect impersonation of vintage lecture-tour Bennett, purring through Larkinesque aphorisms in a soporific Leeds’ brogue, McKenzie is less recognisable, a more private Bennett at one remove from his Radio 4 persona. The world he occupies is also strangely heightened, with visits from a mass-produced social worker (Sophie Robinson), an ominous gangster (Ged McKenna) and a handful of other thin but functional constructs.
It takes a few moments to warm to Nichola McAuliffe’s performance as Miss Shepherd, but once you adjust to the vicar’s wife vowels and her cornucopia of verbal and physical ticks, it becomes clear that this is a formidable and complex embodiment. Balancing eccentricity, fragility, comedy and a great, resounding dignity, Miss Shepherd may look like Jacob Marley in a shit-stained dressing gown, but McAuliffe imbues her with measured hints of sainthood.
Sarah Esdaile’s direction is intelligent and, if there are occasional moments of over-egging, Bennett’s script is tough enough to withstand it; it’s good to see a director tackle his sharper humour without putting a doily under every line. Ben Stones’ set, a curve of darkened brickwork with curtained dormer window, is neat but its placement at head-height fails to suggest the confines of Bennett’s garden. Fortunately, this does facilitate the introduction of three working vehicles, which puff smokily onto the stage, are rotated, raised and ransacked as Miss Shepherd’s passion for vehicular squalor is brilliantly realised.
