The Lady in the Van

Synopsis

Miss Shepherd is a curious and enigmatic lady. Alan knows very little about her. She used to drive ambulances in the war, might have been a nun, sells pencils and pamphlets and has an unexplained aversion to piano music. But somehow she lives in the playwright’s garden and has done for years. The Lady in the Van is based on renowned British playwright Alan Bennett’s own recollections of the indomitable Miss Shepherd and is, as with any Bennett play, a beautifully observed, sharply intelligent and wonderfully witty drama.

Our Review:

21 May 2002

If any writer was going to have an incubus visited upon him, the big money would always have been on Alan Bennett, and surely no other writer would have reported the real-life experience with such elegance and wit. The Lady in the Van first appeared as a monograph from The London Review of Books, then as a section in Writing Home and as a radio serial before premiering on the West End stage in 1999 with Maggie Smith in the lead. There are signs, however, that even he considers this stage adaptation a regurgitation too far.

Whilst it's clearly bizarre to have an eccentric old bird park her van on your forecourt and proceed to live in it for 15 years, it isn't essentially the stuff of drama, and Bennett is forced into adopting somewhat recherche stratagems in trying to make it so. His uncompromising honesty as a historian won't let him falsify the story at all in the pursuit of theatricality, so even when he manufactures little coups de the...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 24 May 2002:

Not one of Bennett's best works - I have to agree with your reviewer that the story has been stretched out too thin - but I thought the "two Alans" device worked well and there were plenty of wonderful lines. I last saw Malcolm Scates as a chirpy Cockney Bottom at York Theatre Royal and was bowled over by his Alan Bennett impersonation - absolutely spot-on!...

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