Enjoy

Synopsis

Written in 1980, Alan Bennett set this dark comedy in his home town of Leeds where an ageing couple are living in the city’s last back-to-back. With the demolition of the area in progress, Wilf and Connie are soon to be re-housed in a brand new maisonette with a waste disposal unit and non-slip vinyl flooring! When a sociologist comes to observe them in their daily life, normality takes a decidedly atypical turn...

Our Review:

3 February 2009

Alan Bennett’s 1980 play, first seen in this fine production by Christopher Luscombe at the Theatre Royal Bath last August, just gets darker and bleaker. Funny isn’t really the word any more, and Luscombe’s suggestion that we take the title as an invitation (in a speech from the stage before curtain-up) seems, in retrospect, somewhat to smack of sarcasm.

With - on press night - most London musicals shut down by the snow and the West End resembling a ghost town, you felt punished enough already by just turning up. And then the highly charged performances of Alison Steadman and David Troughton as Connie and Wilfred Craven (habitually known to each other as “Mam” and “Dad”) take us to the limits of farce until the play freezes into a Beckettian landscape of senility and isolation.

The Cravens are being fingered by the authorities as typical working-class Yorkshire folk whose house will become a museum as the old area in Leeds is demolished. Dad is the victim of a hit-and-r...

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Latest User Review

Gareth James - 2 April 2009:

I caught up with this under-rated play comparatively recently at the Watford Palace, but was lured back by the casting of Alison Steadman and David Troughton as Mam and Dad. It turned out to be the same director-design team, but I don't regret re-visiting it as the performances are terrific. It's a show which was way ahead of its time when it was first produced in 1980. If I have a reservation, it's that the first half is too slow. The second half, however, is a gem!...

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