Wednesday 14th Oct – ‘The Lady in the Van’
All you really need to know about ‘Lady in the Van’ is that Maggie Smith is superb as ‘Miss Shepherd’ – that should be enough encouragement to get you to the cinema. Smith plays the real life tramp who parks her van on Alan Bennett’s driveway for a few weeks and ends up staying for fifteen years. Smith invests Miss Shepherd with a different sort of imperiousness to her Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey but there is, nonetheless, a definite sense of her importance in the world, which often exasperates Alan and his snooty neighbours.
Alex Jennings is a pitch perfect Alan Bennett but I found the device of splitting Alan into two (the writer and the man who goes about the business of day to day living) distinctly odd and, for me, it was rather jarring. I appreciate that it’s not easy to let us into an author’s head in a film without resorting to dull voice over narration but this made Bennett out to be oddly schizophrenic, when he is already quite eccentric enough for most tastes. Nevertheless, his interactions with the lady in the van and his neighbours are a delight. There is also much fun to be had in spotting almost every single cast member of the film ‘The History Boys’ in cameo roles (as well as old friend of mine, Giles Cooper).