One of the UK’s most prolific and best-known living playwrights, ‘History Boy’ Alan Bennett, is making a welcome return to his home county this summer as West Yorkshire Playhouse presents a season of his work to celebrate his 80th birthday.
From full stage plays to more intimate performances, the company will explore a diverse selection of his theatrical outpourings, including three of his famous Talking Heads television monologues and his blackly comic ‘Enjoy’, which is set in Alan’s birthplace of Armley in Leeds.
The great man himself, who became an octogenarian just a week ago, will be seen in ‘An Audience with Alan Bennett’ on Sunday, June 8.
Beginning on Monday ‘Enjoy’ is directed by James Brining and features Marlene Sidaway and Philip Martin Brown as the ‘Mam’ and ‘Dad’, with their daughter Linda played by Emmerdale actress Sian Reese-Williams.
The play focuses on life in one of the remaining back-to-backs in Armley, with the bulldozers inching gradually forwards and the family anticipating a new life in a maisonette with underfloor heating.
Brining is also directing ‘Talking Heads’, the series of monologues written for the BBC in the 1980s, and ‘A Chip in the Sugar’, ‘Bed Among the Lentils’ and ‘Lady of Letters’, which will be embarking on a tour of community venues in and around Leeds prior to performances at the Playhouse from June 23.
The Alan Bennett Season also includes the first regional production of the memoir-based ‘Untold Stories’, directed by Mark Rosenblatt, and starring Reece Dinsdale as the playwright himself. This production opens on the Courtyard stage on June 2.
As well as looking directly at the work of Bennett, the season explores his writing through the eyes of others. In early July, Daniel Buckroyd directs at updated production of the West End musical hit ’Betty Blue Eyes’, which was based on the film ‘A Private Function’ written by Bennett. The Playhouse’s Channel 4 playwright-in-residence Zodwa Nyoni will also offer her take on life in Armley through her play ‘Nine Lives’. BBC 4 is also running a retrospective season of Bennett’s work.
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