House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries

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Venice is the only city I’ve been in, with the possible exception of Cambridge, where there was nothing to offend the eye, and going in winter as I did in those days one would find the Piazza San Marco empty. It was at the Accademia with its thin walls that I first overheard sexual intercourse, and the shout of a man coming, ‘Vengo! Vengo!’ February. One doubtful blessing of my new and sophisticated hearing aids is that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next door.

‘He manages to make me look like a blond Hitler’: Alan

As an over-70, I am officially exhorted to remain isolated and indoors which is to say that my usual going on now has governmental endorsement. The bulk of this witty and thoughtful tome invites us to enter the mind of a now largely immobile mental butterfly. I don’t think Her Majesty ever came to any other of my plays, though not, I’m sure, due to my youthful bêtise. Still, when I next wrote about the queen it might also have caused offence. This was A Question of Attribution, put on at the National Theatre in 1988 and the first time the queen had been represented on the stage. This needs to be said. Prunella Scales’s seamless portrayal of Her Majesty not only preceded, it also surpassed any that came after. Physically much the same as HMQ, Pru had no claim or aspirations to glamour, she even had a touch of the suburban. The sad thing is that only the National Theatre audiences saw and were stunned by this performance. Though John Schlesinger later filmed the play (where HMQ was supported by her corgis) the magic didn’t quite transfer. But Pru was the first and the best. In the central scene of the play the queen has a long conversation with the keeper of the royal pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt. He is a longtime Soviet agent and one of the questions implicit in the scene is whether the queen knows this.It was a smash hit, with every night the audience studded with celebrities, and accordingly at one performance there was the queen. My particular tour de force in the second half was an Anglican sermon, which always went well. Less successful, earlier in the show, was a monologue – stand-up it would be called today – on the subject of corporal and capital punishment, both in those days still going strong. Young enough then to believe that theatre and indeed satire could do some good, I was proud of this piece, though it garnered few laughs and was referred to by the rest of the cast as ‘the boring old man sketch’. The character I played was vehement in his defence of corporal and capital punishment while strongly rebutting any suggestion that the thought of either gave him pleasure. ‘On the contrary,’ I intoned. ‘They produce no erec … no REACTION at all.’ They didn’t produce much of a reaction from the audience either, and on the night the queen was present none at all. To be fair, the management had urged me to tone down the offending sketch, particularly the erection/reaction gag but (rather self-righteously) I refused. There wasn’t much laughter that night in the rest of the show, which normally went by in gales of hilarity, but with the audience only concerned with what the Royal Party was thinking, much of it passed in awkward silence. The scene in question was a pleasure to write. It brought home to me that HMQ (as she was billed in the programme) was a person like no other, a woman who has been everywhere, met everyone and to whom nothing comes as a surprise. At one point Blunt mentions Venice:

9781800811928: House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries - AbeBooks

Photo in the Guardian of a homemade sign at the entrance to Malham village telling or rather entreating the hordes of tourists to go home. In our Yorkshire village 20 miles or so away the car park is full and the place far busier than on a normal Sunday. So far from social distancing some of the visitors practically link arms. Still, it makes a change from brawling over toilet rolls. She was a great woman, her performance of Let’s Do It at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in Lancaster at the avocado counter. Her Dinnerladies was often sentimental, but she caught in the part of the handyman, played by Duncan Preston, the idiom of an old-fashioned working-class man, elaborate, literate and language-loving, which is, or was, more typical of the north than the more cliched dialect-rich versions. There is inevitably family history and talk about life in both Camden Town and Yorkshire, combined with reminiscences of old friends and colleagues adorned by the kind of memorable quotes that would naturally find their way into a commonplace book.

Footnotes

It is not all doom and gloom. On 26 March of that first year, Nicholas Hytner rings with the exciting news that the BBC would like to record a new version of Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues of 1988 because it is exactly the sort of thing that could be done on Zoom. The director pops round later that day to discuss details, which he is obliged to semaphore from the other side of the street. Bennett, in turn, worries that weeks of social isolation have robbed him of the power of speech. On the phone to the optician about his broken glasses, he finds that he has lost the words, and his partner has to take over. Later, arriving at the vaccination centre for his first jab, Bennett firmly announces that he is here “for the virus” (in his defence, he points out that both of them are “v words”). Some time in the afternoon Rupert shouts down that Joe Biden has passed the line and been declared the winner in the presidential election and that the scourge of Trump has been lifted. Though Trump does not agree. Lynn Wagenknecht [owner of the Odeon restaurant in New York] texts from New York saying there is dancing in the street and holds up the phone to let us hear the rejoicing. It should put a smile on people’s faces here but there are few people about. Such relief. Today’s barber is my partner, who manages to make me look like a blond Hitler

House Arrest - British Theatre Guide Book review: House Arrest - British Theatre Guide

One of the pleasures and indeed consolations of a memorial service is in looking round to see who’s there, not something that’s possible on Zoom. So, ideally it should be a roving Zoom. Not, I’m sure, that Geoffrey would have thought he was worth the trouble. August, Yorkshire. Write it and it happens. In the monologue The Shrine I wrote for production during Covid, a biker travelling down the A65 dies in a crash and I imagined incurious sheep gathering to look at the scene of the accident.I never met the queen except once as part of an assembly line and I’m glad as I would have been cripplingly shy. For me she was a creature of myth and I was happy for her to remain so, my notion of her set out in a speech made by the queen herself in ‘The Uncommon Reader’:

Alan Bennett’s pandemic diaries: ‘Good Friday, and this year

May. Remember as a child at Halliday Place in Armley when Dad was rubbing his face with a (sometimes) ill-smelling towel his face used to squeak. Many prospective readers are likely to have enjoyed previous volumes of Bennett diaries and once again this one, though slight, will not disappoint. In 2006 I had the notion of what upset it would cause should the queen ever become an avid reader. A long short story, ‘The Uncommon Reader’ too was a pleasure to write. * The queen, dry, quizzical and absolved from any desire to be liked, is a gift to an author and the reader throughout is on her side. Had it been Elizabeth I it might have been a celebratory masque, as Her Majesty comes well out of every encounter, besting her ministers, her courtiers and even her devoted subjects. There is something about this early lesson in the danger that other people pose that contributes to the impression Alan Bennett always gives of having been primed for apartness. He recounts a telling anecdote from 1941 in which the whole family went on a Sunday fishing expedition in the country. Bennett and his brother wore their school caps, his mother her swagger coat, and his father the suit with the good trousers. Having failed to catch anything – were they even in the right place? – the unlikely sportsmen take themselves stoically home. “We never joined in, got the gear, looked the part,” recalls Bennett and it is clear that he is thinking of more than just fishing. We are en route down the A65 for the funeral of a close friend, Michael Hindle, my solicitor. Almost at Skipton we are in a traffic jam. There has been a fatal accident, with an ambulance already here, a police car and what looks like a body bag. We wait, and as we wait a herd of cows in a field overlooking the road slowly lines up and observes the scene.September. I must be one of the very few of the late queen’s subjects to have said – or almost said – the word ‘erection’ in her presence. It was in 1961 in London’s Fortune Theatre where I was appearing with my colleagues and co-writers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe. Although this is a diary, Bennett doesn’t really say how he spends his days – staring out of the window, presumably, and remembering the past. He talks about the year his family spent in Guildford just after the war, where they noticed that the fish and chip shops used oil instead of beef dripping. “To us the oil smelled disgusting and was yet another score on which ‘down south’ proved a disappointment.”