Hurry - Only 4 left in stock!
|
The complete audio collection of Alan Bennett's celebrated monologues, published together for the first time and performed by some of Britain's best actors
Alan Bennett was born and brought up in Leeds and educated at
Leeds Modern School and Exeter College, Oxford, where he read
history. While doing postgraduate research he began to perform in
cabaret, appearing first on the stage with the Oxford Theatre Group
revue Better Late at Edinburgh in 1959. The following year he
collaborated with Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore to
put together the revue Beyond the Fringe which opened in Edinburgh
and subsequently in the West End and on Broadway.
Bennett’s first stage play, Forty Years On, starring John Gielgud
as the Headmaster, was set in a public school and played for more
than a year in the West End. Subsequent plays included Getting On
(1971) and the farce Habeas Corpus (1973) with Alec Guinness, who
also starred in Bennett’s next play The Old Country (1977). Set in
Russia, this was a play about a Foreign Office defector in exile, a
subject to which Bennett returned in the television play An
Englishman Abroad (1983) starring Alan Bates and Carol Browne and
directed by John Schlesinger. Espionage of a different sort was the
subject of a later play, A Question of Attribution (1988) which
examined the treachery of art historian Sir Anthony Blunt.
Alan Bennett’s other best known works include his adaptation of The
Wind in the Willows (1990) for the National Theatre, The Madness of
George III (1991, also for the National and subsequently an
Oscar-winning film) and, for BBC TV, two series of the monologues
Talking Heads. His collection of diary entries, essays and reviews,
Writing Home, was Book of the Year in 1994.
Alan Bennett has made many recordings for the BBC, including The
Lady in the Van about the eccentric Miss Shepherd, who lived in a
van in his garden, and which he adapted for the stage in 1999 and
for the cinema in 2014. 2005 saw the publication of his first major
collection of writing since Writing Home. Untold Stories brought
together the very best of his writing, as well as his
much-celebrated diaries from 1996-2004.
In 2006, following a sell-out tour, Bennett’s play The History Boys
returned to the National Theatre for an extended run. Set in a
boys’ grammar school in Sheffield, it garnered many awards and went
on to tour New Zealand and Australia and open in New York in 2006.
It received six Tony Awards, and was adapted for the cinema that
same year.
Among Alan Bennett’s more recent work are the stage plays The Habit
of Art (2009), People (2012) and Cocktail Sticks (2012) and the
novella Smut (2011).
Ask a Question About this Product More... |