Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 1

by Alan Bennett

BRIAN: No, I see it. A clear issue. Vermin. The Tory beast. The old ogre of intolerance as it still stalks the constituencies. That’s how she fits in, that dog woman, Mrs Boothroyd.

  POLLY: Brodribb.

  BRIAN: A target a mile wide and all stupid. Safe enough there, George.

  GEORGE: That’s balls. Whoever it was it’s monstrous. You can’t think it’s just that.

  BRIAN: Not just, though that’s part of it. You’d like a good fight, wouldn’t you, George?

  GEORGE: Yes, I would. It’s a scandal.

  BRIAN: It’s a scandal. And they’re pretty hard to come by, aren’t they, situations where there isn’t something to be said on both sides? No balance. No assessment needed. No. That’s what you’re missing and you’d enjoy it too much. Something really solid to fetch the phrases out, get the life-giving adrenalin flowing. Well, I wouldn’t waste them on me. Save them for the old age pensioners.

  GEORGE: Brian.

  BRIAN: No offence, George. I appreciate it. Night, love. (He kisses POLLY. Exits.)

  GEORGE: He’s worked up about it now. I’ll go after him.

  POLLY: No.

  GEORGE: But he’s wrong. He must put up a fight about it. It’s years ago. My God if they can do that… he’ll come round. I mean. What do you think? It’s pathetic.

  POLLY: There’ve probably been other times.

  GEORGE: Have there? Not that anybody knows about. Anyway, what if there have. These days. It’s nothing. Nothing. Bassington.

  POLLY: Blessington.

  GEORGE: I’d like an electric device to send a short sharp shock through the arses of men like that. And when was it, 1955,

  ’56. Fifteen years ago. Five minutes with a soldier in the park. Jesus Christ. What is there in that that makes him unfit to represent the people. What next, it makes you wonder, nose picking?

  (POLLY slips out during this speech, crying.)

  ‘It has come to our notice that in March 1953 in the course of a weekend at the Hyde Park Hotel on three separate occasions and notwithstanding there was a lavatory only a few yards down the corridor, you nevertheless took it upon yourself to piss in the basin. This, taken in conjunction with the fact that you have frequently failed to change your underwear twice daily has raised grave doubts as to your suitability to continue to represent this constituency and the committee has therefore decided that…’

  (He finds he is alone. He sits down on the sofa, silent and jaded. He begins to get ready for bed. Unbuttons his shirt, puts out some of the lights. Faintly, as ever, music upstairs. ANDY comes in through the outside door.)

  ANDY: George.

  GEORGE: Hello.

  ANDY: S’Mam?

  GEORGE: Bed, I think. Been out?

  ANDY: Yep. Geoff go?

  (GEORGE nods.)

  Any food?

  GEORGE: In the oven.

  (ANDY goes into kitchen.)

  Better turn it off. And throw away what you don’t want.

  ANDY: You not eating?

  GEORGE: No.

  ANDY: (Poised with several cartons over the waste bin) Sure?

  GEORGE: No.

  (He drops in the cartons with a thud and a shrug. This dumping must be quite explicit and pointed, dumping several cartons distinctly and separately, opening waste bin with his foot each time.)

  ANDY: S’matter?

  GEORGE: Tired.

  ANDY: Go to bed.

  GEORGE: In a minute. She kick you out?

  ANDY: Who?

  GEORGE: You tell me.

  ANDY: No. (Pause.) No.

  GEORGE: So.

  ANDY: I went down the pub.

  GEORGE: What for? (Pause.)

  ANDY: A drink. Two drinks. Smoke.

  GEORGE: Thought you didn’t go in for pubs much.

  ANDY: Who?

  GEORGE: You. Youth. Young people. The younger generation.

  ANDY: Us.

  GEORGE: Us. That’s the big difference. We were never us.

  ANDY: I don’t feel it.

  GEORGE: I didn’t then. We’ll go down as the last generation before the pill. Still making sly visits to back-street herbalists for the tell-tale pink and purple packets. We … I … went by train to country stations, Shepreth, Melbourne, Foxton. Distance was still measured in cycle rides, not yet annihilated by the motor car. And with army appetites found out good places to eat. Good meals used to be an achievement then, good restaurants anyway. Not like now, an indulgence, an ordeal or a chore. Then really found reason to welcome Suez. For there we were scattered all over England and suddenly we linked hands and became a generation. By which time I was twenty-eight. Some youth.

  ANDY: That’s the new period in Α-levels. Contemporary History from Munich to Suez.

  (GEORGE laughs.)

  GEORGE: Andy.

  ANDY: Yes.

  GEORGE: I don’t mind, you know… I go on at you… but say, if you wanted to bring anyone back here, you can.

  ANDY: No.

  GEORGE: You never do.

  ANDY: No … it’s … there’s never any need.

  GEORGE: I don’t mind. Polly might. But it’s all the same to me whatever you do, really.

  ANDY: Thanks.

  GEORGE: I mean, to stop if you want them to…

  ANDY: I knew what you meant. I reckon I’m off to bed.

  GEORGE: I suppose that would take some of the fun out of it. Or isn’t it fun any more? I suppose you’re so cool you never notice. You do have a bird?

  ANDY: Sometimes.

  GEORGE: That isn’t what I meant.

  ANDY: Isn’t it? You’re frightened of getting old, Dad, aren’t you? Oh, yes, you are, Dad. You think somehow, Dad, I’m going to supply the vitality. Well, I’m not, Dad. Do you know what your trouble is, Dad?

  GEORGE: What’s all this Dad business? What’s the matter with George all of a sudden?

  ANDY: You’ve stopped looking at things. You don’t look and then alter. That’s being old, Dad. Not changing any more. So do you want to know something? If you want precise information, I’ve never been to bed with anybody ever.

  GEORGE: I’m sorry.

  ANDY: Ever. Have you ever thought what’s happened to all the shy people? What’s become of them all of a sudden?

  GEORGE: Right.

  ANDY: Whatever happened to reserve, Dad, and self-consciousness? Was it your government that got rid of guilt? Tell me this, Dad. How is it easier, how is it easier to reach out and touch someone for the first time? Why is it easier for me now, than it was for you then, whenever that was? Because that’s the irreducible fact. You envy me, sniffing out what I do, fishing out where I’ve been, trying to calculate exactly where I’ve got to in the sexual stakes. Well, listen, Dad, there’s nothing to envy yet. You can sleep easy at nights, because I haven’t even started.

  GEORGE: OK, OK.

  ANDY: But I tell you this, Dad …

  (POLLY comes down in her dressing-gown with transistor.) When I do start, and I care, and you say things like that to me, then I shan’t simply tell you to mind your own bloody business, I shall just go. Leave.

  GEORGE: Yes, you do that, Son … You do that. You’re the New Puritans, you lot. Get through the haze of pot and cheap fellowship and underneath you’re like everybody else, harsh, censorious bastards.

  ANDY: And sometimes, Dad, keep your mouth shut. That’s cool. I commend it to you.

  (ANDY goes upstairs.

  GEORGE sits for a moment on the sofa.)

  POLLY: Come on, love, I’m sorry.

  GEORGE: What a foul day it’s been. All in all.

  POLLY: Yes. About Enid. Is she all right, do you think?

  GEORGE: Enid? I don’t know. I wondered. It seemed funny.

  POLLY: Yes, it did.

  GEORGE: I can ring that doctor, if you like?

  POLLY: No.

  GEORGE: Her I care about, don’t I?

  POLLY: What? Come on, I didn’t mean it.

  GEORGE: Anyway, if it isn’t all right, it must mean … there isn’
t anything to be done. Oh-o-oh. Feel old. And tomorrow it’s the new session. A few more years in the cold. Then perhaps a Minister for five years, ten if we’re lucky. Then I shall be sixty and out. My name to a statute, perhaps, and that’s my posterity. That and Andy.

  POLLY: And James and Elizabeth.

  GEORGE: I was a lackey of Transport House. The sum of a small irrelevant career in English public life in the second half of the twentieth century.

  POLLY: I wonder, wherever we lived, if we’d be the same? Outside London. East Anglia, say. How do people live there? (Pause.) Or Truro.

  GEORGE: (Who has slit open a postal packet containing the local paper sent from the constituency) Truro?

  POLLY: The provinces. Anywhere. People are nicer. Better, anyway. It’s London that’s wrong.

  (She should retrieve the string and brown paper, tidy to the last, and put it away in a drawer.)

  GEORGE: I was thinking if they’d ever have me back at Oxford we could live in the country all the time. The Cotswolds practically. A lot of them do.

  POLLY: Except if we lived outside London, the provinces say, are there people like us? It might be like staying up at Cambridge during the long vac. Having to make do with people who were there, whether you liked them or not.

  GEORGE: What?

  POLLY: Nothing.

  GEORGE: Or just come up here at weekends.

  POLLY: London. Come on up.

  (POLLY pauses with hand on light switch as GEORGE gets up with the local paper. He sees an item that interests him.)

  GEORGE: That’s funny. Do you remember, a long time ago I had a West Indian woman who thought next door were poisoning her cats?

  POLLY: No. (Goes off.)

  GEORGE: I thought she was mad. She wasn’t. They were. She’s taken them to court and they’ve been fined.

  (GEORGE switches light off, light streams from stairs door, and he goes upstairs as the curtain comes down.)

  HABEAS CORPUS

  CHARACTERS

  ARTHUR WICKSTEED, a general practitioner

  MURIEL WICKSTEED, his wife

  DENNIS WICKSTEED, their son

  CONSTANCE WICKSTEED, the doctor’s sister

  MRS SWABB, a cleaning lady

  CANON THROBBING, a celibate

  LADY RUMPERS, a white settler

  FELICITY RUMPERS, her daughter

  MR SHANKS, a sales representative

  SIR PERCY SHORTER, a leading light in the medical profession

  MR PURDUE, a sick man

  All scenes take place in and around the Wicksteeds’ house in Hove.

  When the play opened at the Lyric Theatre on 10 May 1973 the cast was as follows:

  ARTHUR WICKSTEED Alec Guinness

  MURIEL WICKSTEED Margaret Courtenay

  DENNIS WICKSTEED Christopher Good

  CONSTANCE WICKSTEED Phyllida Law

  MRS SWABB Patricia Hayes

  CANON THROBBING Roddy Maude-Roxby

  LADY RUMPERS Joan Sanderson

  FELICITY RUMPERS Madeline Smith

  MR SHANKS Andrew Sachs

  SIR PERCY SHORTER John Bird

  MR PURDUE Mike Carnell

  Directed by Ronald Eyre

  Designed by Derek Cousins

  Music by Carl Davis

  Presented by Michael Codron in association with Stoll Productions

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The text printed here is as first performed at the Lyric Theatre, London, in May 1973. In the rehearsal version of the play I included no stage directions in an effort to achieve as fluid a presentation as possible. In the printed version I have marked a minimum of entrances and exits to make the action more readily comprehensible to the reader.

  The play was presented on an open stage furnished with three chairs. All props, telephone, parcel, etc., were handed in from the wings. Much of the dialogue was delivered straight to the audience to an extent that makes it tedious to indicate all remarks taken as asides.

  I would like to thank Ronald Eyre for his invaluable assistance with the text.

  ACT ONE

  WICKSTEED: Look at him. Just look at that look on his face. Do you know what that means? He wants me to tell him he’s not going to die. You’re not going to die. He is going to die. Not now, of course, but some time … ten, fifteen years, who knows? I don’t. We don’t want to lose you, do we? And off he goes. Sentence suspended. Another ten years. Another ten years showing the slides. (‘That’s Malcolm, Pauline and Baby Jason.’) Another ten years going for little runs in the car. (‘That’s us at the Safari Park.’) ‘So what did the doctor say, dear?’ ‘Nothing, oh, nothing. It was all imagination.’ But it’s not all imagination. Sometimes I’m afraid, it actually happens.

  MRS WICKSTEED’S VOICE: Arthur! Arthur!

  MRS SWABB: It’s all in the mind. Me, I’ve never had a day’s illness in my life. No. I tell a lie. I once had my tonsils out. I went in on the Monday; I had it done on the Tuesday; I was putting wallpaper up on the Wednesday. My name is Mrs Swabb (hoover, hoover, hoover) someone who comes in; and in all that passes, I represent ye working classes. Hoover, hoover, hoover. Hoover, hoover, hoover. Now then, let’s have a little more light on the proceedings and meet our contestants, the wonderful, wonderful Wicksteed family. Eyes down first for tonight’s hero, Dr Arthur Wicksteed, a general practitioner in Brighton’s plush, silk stocking district of Hove. Is that right, Doctor?

  WICKSTEED: Hove, that’s right, yes.

  MRS SWABB: And you are fifty-three years of age.

  WICKSTEED: Dear God, am I?

  MRS SWABB: I’m afraid that’s what I’ve got down here.

  WICKSTEED: Fifty-three!

  MRS SWABB: Any hobbies?

  WICKSTEED: No. No. Our friends, the ladies, of course, but nothing much else.

  MRS SWABB: Do you mind telling us what your ambition is?

  WICKSTEED: Ambition? No, never had any. Partly the trouble, you see. When you’ve gone through life stopping at every lamp-post, no time.

  MRS SWABB: Next we have …

  MRS WICKSTEED: I can manage thank you. Elocution was always my strong point. Speak clearly, speak firmly, speak now. Name: Wicksteed, Muriel Jane. Age? Well, if you said fifty you’d be in the target area. Wife to the said Arthur Wicksteed and golly, don’t I know it. Still potty about him though, the dirty dog. Oh, shut up, Muriel.

  MRS SWABB: And now … this is Dennis, only son of Arthur and Muriel Wicksteed. And what do you do, Dennis?

  DENNIS: Nothing very much. I think I’ve got lockjaw.

  MRS SWABB: Really? Whereabouts?

  DENNIS: All over.

  MRS SWABB: Are you interested in girls at all?

  DENNIS: If they’re clean.

  MRS SWABB: That goes without saying. You don’t want a dirty girl, do you?

  DENNIS: In a way, I do, yes.

  MRS WICKSTEED: Dennis!

  MRS SWABB: And now we have the doctor’s sister, Miss Constance Wicksteed. Connie is a thirty-three-year-old spinster …

  CONNIE: I am not a spinster. I am unmarried.

  MRS SWABB: And to go with her mud-coloured cardigan Connie has chosen a fetching number in form-fitting cretonne. Have you any boyfriends, dear?

  CONNIE: No.

  MRS SWABB: Connie, you big story! What about Canon Throbbing, our thrusting young vicar? Why! That sounds like his Biretta now.

  (THROBBING crosses on his power-assisted bicycle.)

  Now, Connie, would you like to tell the audience what your ambition is? Go on, just whisper.

  CONNIE: I’d like a big bust.

  MRS SWABB: And what would you do with it when you’d got it?

  CONNIE: Flaunt it.

  MRS WICKSTEED: Connie!

  MRS SWABB: Three strangers too are in the town. A lady and her daughter. …

  SIR PERCY: Out of my way, we’re wasting time: I am Sir Percy Shorter. Shorter, Percy, KCB, President, British Medical Association. Venuing this week at Brighton.

  MRS WICKSTEED: Percy!
<
br />   WICKSTEED: My wife’s sometime sweetheart.

  MRS WICKSTEED: The man I spurned.

  SIR PERCY: Well? Aren’t you going to ask me what my ambition is?

  MRS SWABB: President of the British Medical Association! What more can a man want?

  SIR PERCY: Revenge.

  MRS SWABB: I don’t like it. Two strangers now are in the town, a lady and her daughter …

  LADY RUMPERS: England, my poor England. What have they done to you? Don’t touch me. That’s one thing I’ve noticed returning to these shores. There’s a great deal more touching going on. If I want to be touched I have people who love me who can touch me. Touching is what loved ones are for, because loving takes the sting out of it. Delia, Lady Rumpers, widow of General Sir Frederick Rumpers. Tiger to his friends and to his enemies too, by God. Does the name Rumpers ring a bell?

  WICKSTEED: Very, very faintly.

  LADY RUMPERS: Time was when it would have rung all the bells in England. Rumpers of Rhodesia, Rumpers of Rangoon-when the history of the decline of the British Empire comes to be written, the name Rumpers will be in the index. For many years we were stationed in Addis Ababa. Tiger was right-hand man to the Lion of Judah.

  MRS SWABB: Haile Selassie.

  LADY RUMPERS: There followed a short spell in K.L.

  MRS SWABB: Kings Langley.

  LADY RUMPERS: Kuala Lumpur.

  MRS WICKSTEED: Of course.

  LADY RUMPERS: Then we fetched up in Rhodesia. In a green meadow on the outskirts of Salisbury, roses bloom and the trees are alive with the songs of multi-coloured birds. There we laid him.

  (DENNIS sniffs.)

  I am upsetting you?

  CONNIE: He has hay fever.

  LADY RUMPERS: From end to end I’ve searched the land looking for a place where England is still England.

  WICKSTEED: And now she’s hit on Hove.

  LADY RUMPERS: My daughter. …

  (Everyone looks but no one enters.)

  Felicity, at present changing her Hammond Innes. We had a terrible experience coming down. We had to move our compartment three times to avoid a clergyman who was looking up her legs under cover of the Daily Telegraph.

  MRS WICKSTEED: And such a respectable newspaper.

  LADY RUMPERS: I lie awake at night in a cold sweat wondering what would happen if Felicity’s body fell into the wrong hands.