Is there anyone left in the world who hasn’t heard about that time Alan Bennett let a lady in a van stay in his front yard for 15 years? Alan Bennett certainly hopes so, otherwise there’ll be no one left to buy tickets to another of its retellings. The Lady in the Van was originally published as an article in the London Review of Books, and has been translated into a novella, a stage show, a radio play and a feature film, with Maggie Smith in the last three iterations as the eponymous lady. MTC thinks it a cracking idea as a vehicle for Miriam Margolyes. For a van that goes nowhere, it’s sure done a lot of mileage.
The problem is that, as a functioning play, it isn’t very good. There’s a set-up we almost definitely knew before entering the theatre, followed by a long period of complete stasis where she stays in the van and nobody else goes anywhere either, rounded off with a number of false endings that reach for the metatheatrical but come across as merely false. It makes a couple of accommodations to the idea of theatricality, but it never gives us a genuine theatrical reason to exist. The effect is like watching fine actors try to animate a series of cardboard cutouts.
Alan Bennett is played on stage by two fine actors, Daniel Frederiksen and James Millar (who both appeared in vastly different guise as, respectively, the deadbeat dad and monstrous tormentor of Matilda). Here, they’re encouraged to mimic each other’s vocal registers and physical ticks so much they cancel each other out. The script tells us that there are two Bennetts because one can never make up his mind. Frederiksen plays the Bennett who exists within the confines of the story, and Millar plays the one who is outside it, writing it all down. But so little is made of this dramatically that you begin to wonder if it’s worth it.
As for the lady herself? Well, she’s Miriam Margolyes, so naturally she’s fabulous. A short, stout woman who waddles about the stage like a whack-a-mole who’s escaped the arcade and is threatening to whack back, she dominates the space even when she’s not in it. There are vast inconsistencies in the part – she’s a toweringly independent person who apparently and irrevocably turned away from music because a nun was mean to her once – but Margolyes papers over them with a kind of crackling charm. Bennett talks of her poverty smelling like wet newspaper, but actually it’s warm and ashy, like embers.
The rest of the cast are under-utilised and, apart from Richard Piper in a number of sharply drawn roles, ineffectual. This is less a fault of the actors than the creative team as a whole, starting with Bennett himself, who crafts a story that may have sociological appeal in a piece of personal memoir but has almost no dramatic traction in the theatre. His witticisms play well on the page, but coming from the mouth of the actors impersonating him, they seem smug and self-congratulatory. Even the theme of a writer’s responsibility to the truth versus the attractions of fiction is undercooked.
Director Dean Bryant, instead of mitigating these faults, feeds and engorges them, especially in regards to pacing and rhythm; long tracts of the first act are arch and leaden, and the fruitiness of the Bennetts, in particular, is off-putting. The set (Alicia Clements) is a large part of the problem. A bluestone wall bifurcates the stage in a way that simply flattens the playing space. Various props and people are literally pulled on and off on horizontal tracks, like paper cutouts in a toy theatre. Model versions of the van in variations of scale are wheeled on and off, to what seems desperate purpose. The effect is sodden and monotonous. The second act is better because there’s more going on, but then Bryant ends the piece with some ludicrous stage business that wouldn’t be out of place in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
The temptation to blame Bryant entirely for all this overly determined, over-designed production’s failures is strong, but MTC has opened a few of their seasons with international fare that didn’t quite deliver on its promise – last year was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (which obviously had its fans and sold very well), and a few years ago they opened with Jumpy as a star vehicle for Jane Turner. These high profile shows should help MTC reach a bigger audience, but it’s hard to imagine new generations will flock to this show, even if it does star Professor Sprout.
