- Bennett, Alan
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British dramatist, screenwriter, and actor.He first gained success with the brilliant satirical revue Beyond the Fringe (1960), which he cowrote and performed with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller. His first stage play, Forty Years On (1968), was followed by plays such as Getting On (1971) and Enjoy (1980). He later wrote works for television, including An Englishman Abroad (1982) and Talking Heads (1988), which were marked by his characteristic mixture of wry comedy and sadness. His screenplays include Prick Up Your Ears (1987). His successful play The Madness of King George (1991) was made into an acclaimed film in 1994.
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▪ 2006The year 2005 saw a crowning achievement in the life of British dramatist Alan Bennett when his play The History Boys garnered both the Critics' Circle Theatre Award and the Laurence Olivier Award for best new play, and Bennett, after a career spanning five decades, received the Olivier Special Award. The play, set in Yorkshire in the 1980s, featured a clash of values between two teachers coaching a class of state-school boys through their university entrance examinations; it succeeded both as a serious-minded critique of Britain's education system—then and now—and as a superbly comic entertainment. In mid-2005 production began on a film version of The History Boys and a new Broadway staging due to open in 2006.Bennett, the son of a butcher, was born on May 9, 1934, in Leeds, Yorkshire. He attended Leeds Modern School and gained a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied history. His fledgling career as a history don at Magdalen College, Oxford, was cut short after he enjoyed enormous success with the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe in 1960. He coauthored and starred in the show with Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore, and the foursome played to packed houses in Edinburgh, London, and New York City. Bennett's first play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968 and starred John Gielgud. It was followed by numerous plays, films, and television serials; a best-selling collection of Bennett's diaries and reminiscences, titled Writing Home; and several pieces for radio. In 1987 Talking Heads, a series of monologues for television, made him a household name and earned him the first of his five Oliviers. The Madness of George III premiered at the National Theatre in 1991, and the 1994 film adaptation, The Madness of King George, secured several Academy Award nominations, including one for Bennett's screenplay.Bennett's special talent was his translation of the mundane into tragicomic dramas, and he was even able to bring his light touch to his work when referring to intellectual heavyweights such as Wittgenstein or Kafka. Bennett fearlessly scrutinized the British class system, propriety, and England's north-south cultural divide with results that were simultaneously chilling and hilarious. Meanwhile, his gift for creating an authentic dialogue for the “ordinary people” of his own background sat curiously beside his ability to portray the manners of middle and upper classes in such pieces as An Englishman Abroad, his 1983 TV play about the real-life meeting of actress Coral Browne and the notorious spy Guy Burgess. It was Bennett's diversity of talent that delighted audiences and led critics to hail him as perhaps the premier playwright of his day.In September 2005 his fans were introduced to a new side of Bennett when he published the memoir Untold Stories, in which he looked back affectionately at his parents, poignantly reflected on his mother's descent into senility and her death in a nursing home, and revealed for the first time that in 1997 he had received treatment for what had been believed to be terminal cancer.Siobhan Dowd* * *
Universalium. 2010.
