Alan Bennett takes swipe at National Trust in new play

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/oct/30/alan-bennett-national-trust-play

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Plays by Alan Bennett are an event: sold out months ahead and their subjects kept a closely guarded secret until the lights go up on the first performance.

But ahead of the first preview of his latest work for the National Theatre the author has revealed that the play emerged as a result of disquiet at one of Middle England's most revered institutions: the National Trust.

The work became a lament for a country that is becoming "less and less … a nation and more and more just a captive market to be exploited".

The immediate prompt to write People, according to Bennett, in an essay for the London Review of Books, was his sense of unease when visiting National Trust houses, and his dislike of being "informed about the room" by the resident guide. "I have learned," he writes, "not to show too much interest as this invariably fetches the guide over."

The play, starring Frances de la Tour, is set in a country house that has recently been given over to the National Trust. In it, Bennett imagines the organisation to be "entirely without inhibition, ready to exploit any aspect of the property's recent history".

The house in the play is, for example, hired out as the set for a porn film – something that he regarded as implausible, he writes, before he learned that a video guide at one stately home is voiced by "Jeffrey Archer, euphemistically described by the Trust at a 'provocative figure'." He adds: "Imagining I was ahead of my times, I then found I was scarcely even abreast of them."

This material became, for Bennett, a way of offering comment on a society in which "there is nothing that cannot be bought and sold".

The 1980s – also seen as a balefully pivotal period for Britain in his play The History Boys – are regarded in People as a turning point, the time when "we ceased to take things for granted and self-interest and self-servingness took over". This "alteration in public life" is to be deeply regretted, he writes.

"The state has never frightened me. Why should it? It gave me my education (and in those days it was a gift); it saved my father's life as it has on occasion saved mine by services we are now told have to be paid for."

He also laments "the growth of surliness in everyday behaviour and the sour taste of public life..

He writes: "There has been a diminution of magnanimity in government both central and local, with the public finding itself rebranded as customers, supposedly to dignify our requirements but in effect to make us available for easier exploitation."