People – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/nov/08/people-alan-bennett-lyttelton

Version 0 of 1.

In 1980 Alan Bennett wrote Enjoy, which showed a Leeds working-class house and its occupants being preserved as a museum exhibit.

Now, in his mordantly funny new play, he shows a South Yorkshire country house and its upper-crust owners being similarly turned into a part of the heritage industry. And, while the play has one or two awkward contrivances, it confirms Bennett's peculiar gift for blending the satiric and the elegiac.

People hinges on the future of a stately pile. Dorothy, a peer and ex-model, lives in this mouldering mansion with her companion, Iris, and shrinks from the idea of it being opened to the public gaze; she is even tempted by an offer from a valuer, working on behalf of a shadowy consortium, to transport the whole house to Dorset or Wiltshire.

Meanwhile, Dorothy's gruff archdeacon of a sister, June, is close to doing a deal with the National Trust, which will both make the house a piece of English history and fill it with racily interactive features.

But a third possibility arises when a film company turns up to use the site as a location for a porn movie.

"This is not Allegory House," Dorothy proclaims at one point, refusing to see it as a metaphor for England.

But, inescapably, that is what it becomes, since Bennett himself uses the house to make a series of sharp, stabbing points about our urge to commodify all human experience. Dorothy hoards old newspapers from the 1980s, a decade in which, her sister observes: "Everything had a price. If it didn't have a price, it didn't have a value."

And Bennett shows how the process has accelerated to the point of absurdity. The man from the National Trust talks of preserving Belfast's Maze prison in aspic and gets wildly excited by the discovery that the threatened property contains old piss-pots in which the urine of famous guests is lovingly maintained.

At times, Bennett bends his plot to suit his thesis. I found the idea of a former liaison between Dorothy and the porn producer a bit strained and, when the movie is being shot, you know that a visiting bishop is bound to intrude.

But Bennett's play fascinates because it shows the two sides of his nature coming into fruitful conflict. His more conservative side shares Dorothy's resentment that the crowd should find its way into the secret garden. His radical side is appalled at the corrosive legacy of Thatcherism.

All this comes across clearly in Nicholas Hytner's production and in Bob Crowley's design, which shows the shabby mansion being tartily and spectacularly transformed.

Frances de la Tour, below, also blissfully inhabits the plum role of the dilapidated Dorothy, nostalgic for a world in which everything, including herself, is allowed to decay naturally. Selina Cadell as her brusquely clerical sister, Linda Bassett as her withered companion, Nicholas Le Prevost as the zealous property restorer and Peter Egan as the porn-broker provide excellent support.

The play raises the intriguing prospect of a running war between two NTs: the National Theatre and the National Trust. But, more than that, it shows Bennett has lost none of his edge when it comes to pinning down the violation of our national life by the notion that everything is subject to the values of the market. <em> </em>