Book description
This collection of Alan Bennett's work includes his first play and
West End hit, Forty Years On, as well as Getting On, Habeus Corpus,
and Enjoy. Forty Years On 'Alan Bennett's most gloriously funny play
... a brilliant, youthful perception of a nation in decline, as seen
through the eyes of a home-grown school play ... a classic.' Daily
Mail Getting On Winner of the Evening Standard Best Comedy Award in
1971, Getting on is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, so
self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is
having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law in dying, his
son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool
and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a
self-esteeming joke. Habeus Corpus 'After two elegiac comedies about
the decline of old England, Mr Bennett has now written a gorgeously
vulgar but densely plotted facre that is a downright celebration of
sex and the human body ... a combination of hurtling action with
verbal brilliance.' Guardian Enjoy Enjoy uncannily foresaw the
attitudes to English working-class life now enshrined in themeparks.
'The classic tug in Bennett between childhod Yorkshire and
intellectual sophistication has never been better, or more daringly
expressed.' Observer
Alan Bennett first appeared on the stage in 1960 as one of the
authors and performers of the revue Beyond the Fringe. His stage plays
include Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, The Old Country and
The Lady in the Van, and he has written many television plays, notably A
Day Out, Sunset Across the Bay, A Woman of No Importance and the series
of monologues Talking Heads. An adaptation of his television play, An
Englishman Abroad, was paired with A Question of Attribution in the
double-bill Single Spies, first produced at the National Theatre in
1988. This was followed in 1990 by his adaptation of The Wind in the
Willows and in 1991 by The Madness of George III. His most recent play,
The History Boys, won the Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards
for Best Play, The Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, and The
South Bank Award. Alan Bennett's latest collection of prose, Untold
Stories, was published in 2005 by Faber and Faber and Profile Books.
