People (Tour – Salford)

The usually inoffensive National Trust gets a grilling in Alan Bennett's satire.

Dorothy and her companion Iris sit on two comfortable chairs covered in blankets in a cold stately home in South Yorkshire. Dustsheets cover the furniture, the boiler is broken and Wedgwood bowls are being used to catch the leaks from the roof.

Dorothy's younger sister June wants to give the house to the National Trust so that they can repair it and to avoid death duties, but Dorothy is stubbornly refusing and flirting with the idea of selling it to a group of wealthy individuals who promise to do it up without a load of "people" visiting it.

Sian Philips plays the eccentric former fashion model filled with dread at the thought of the house having a café and being tramped around by people. Bridget Forsyth is excellent as Iris with her deadpan humour and Selina Cadell is the overbearing younger sister.

But the characters fail to be any more than surface personalities and it is difficult to feel any particular attachment to them. Bennett does try and inject some depth and pathos to Dorothy, but the background story of a miscarriage seems thrown in as an afterthought, and when she brings it up the sudden solemnity jars slightly with her general demeanour.

The play is somewhat plodding at times and only really properly picks up when the Trust's representative Ralph Lumsden wades in. Michael Thomas is very funny as the enthused Lumsden, enthralled by the house's period features but at the same time desperately trying to think up ways of enticing more visitors in.

Bennett captures some of the predicament of the charity today. His attack on their attempts to modernise (Lumsden talks about trying to buy Cilla Black's home) is trumped in real life by the recent opening by the Trust of the Big Brother house.

The National Trust does not come high on most people's lists of evils and to attack it seems a little petty. That said, the majority of the (slightly older) audience was laughing at every joke, so perhaps it is a generation thing.

It is an enjoyable play and of course brilliantly well written, but overall People falls a little flat.

– Joanna Ing