Book description
It's a dwindling band; old-fashioned and of a certain age, you
can pick us out at funerals and memorial services because we can
sing the hymns without the book.
Alan Bennett writes: In 2001 the Medici Quartet commissioned the
composer George Fenton to write them a piece commemorating their
thirtieth anniversary. George Fenton appeared in my play Forty
Years On and has written music for many of my plays since, and
he asked me to collaborate on the commission. Hymn was the
result. First performed at the Harrogate Festival in August 2001,
it's a series of memoirs with music. Besides purely instrumental
passages for the quartet, many of the speeches are under-scored,
incorporating some of the hymns and music I remember from my
childhood and youth. The text includes both words and music.
Hymn is coupled with Cocktail Sticks, an oratorio
without music that revisits some of the themes and conversations of
Alan Bennett's memoir A Life Like Other People's. A son talks
to his dead father as his mother yearns for a different life. It's
funny, tender and sad.
The pinnacle of my social life is a scrutty bit of lettuce and
tomato and some tinned salmon. Mind you, I read in Ideal
Home that if you mix tinned salmon with this soft cheese you
can make it into one of those moussy things. Shove a bit of lemon
on it and it looks really classy.
Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since the success
of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads
has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for stage
including Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, A Question of
Attribution, The Madness of George III (together with the
Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George), and an
adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. At the National
Theatre, London, The History Boys won numerous awards including Evening
Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play, an Olivier for Best
New Play and the South Bank Award. On Broadway, The History Boys won
five New York Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics' Circle Awards, a
New York Drama Critics' Award, a New York Drama League Award and six
Tonys. The Habit of Art opened at the National in 2009 and People in
2012, together with two short plays, Hymn and Cocktail Sticks. His
collection of prose Untold Stories won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for
autobiography, 2006. Recent works of fiction are The Uncommon Reader and
Smut: Two Unseemly Stories.
