Untold Stories

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Mr Parr sees it all the time because he is the Mental Health Welfare Officer for the Craven district and late this September evening in 1966 Dad and I are sitting in his bare linoleum-floored office above Settle police station while he takes a history of my mother. Then there are the diary entries, which are surprisingly interesting considering I’ve never really been nosy enough to want to read someone else’s journals. I think it helps that they’re relatively recent diaries, and so when he’s reacting to world events, I can remember when a lot of them happened. Or set it in the kitchen, the empty room between them, no one on-stage at all, just the voices off. And what happens when they do come on-stage? Violence, probably.

The Guardian Chronicles of a death foretold | Biography books | The Guardian

Kennedy, Maev "A small way of saying thank you: Bennett donates his life's work to the Bodleian", The Guardian, 24 October 2008 At some point when he was still a boy Dad took it into his head to learn the violin. Why he chose an instrument that in its initial stages is so unrewarding I don’t know; it’s one of the many questions I never got round to asking him. He got no help at home, where he could only practise in the freezing parlour, the Gimmer too mean even to let him have any light, so that he had to manage with what there was from the gas lamp in the street outside. Whether he was born with perfect pitch I don’t know, but in later life he would play along to the hymns on the wireless, telling you the notes of the tune he was accompanying as easily as if he was spelling a word. In happier circumstances he would have been a professional violinist but there was never any hope of that and a butcher he remained, working first for the Co-op then, in 1946, buying a shop of his own, which he had to sell ten years later because of ill-health, then buying a smaller one and the same thing happening. Having made no money and the job having given him precious little satisfaction, he was never so happy as when in 1966 he was able to abandon butchering for good. Then the book lurches into an interminable section of diaries. Friends who read it all tell me there is some good stuff in there, but there was just too much. Yes, I know Bennett is a master at making the banal fun, but there's a limit. Hire an editor, Alan. It was in 1925, in the kitchen at Gilpin Place, the spot pointed out: ‘There by the dresser your grandad died, plain in the sight of everybody.’ That they were not living at Gilpin Place at the time had never, of course, occurred to me.In the autobiographical sketches which form a large part of the book Bennett wrote openly for the first time about his bisexuality. Previously Bennett had referred to questions about his sexuality as like asking a man who has just crawled across the Sahara desert to choose between Perrier or Malvern mineral water. [24] Alan Bennett (born 9 May 1934) is an English playwright, author, actor and screenwriter. Over his entertainment career he has received numerous awards and honours including two BAFTA Awards, four Laurence Olivier Awards, and two Tony Awards. He also earned an Academy Award nomination for his film The Madness of King George (1994). In 2005 he received the Society of London Theatre Special Award. We publish a Literature Newsletter when we have news and features on UK and international literature, plus opportunities for the industry to share. There is much that clearly distresses Bennett about modern Britain, particularly the way that it educates its young, and the encroachment of the market on services such as libraries and galleries. But he disassociates himself firmly from Larkin's fastidious despair. His is a generous sadness; he wants what was good about the past to be available still, and fears that it is not. While he makes it clear that he sees the child of today as, in significant ways, disadvantaged, he also sees that the children themselves are as good as ever. Facing mortality tends to force radical shifts in perception; hospitals dismantle taboos and privacies, things that used to matter suddenly don't seem so important. The result is some of the most intimate and personal writing Bennett has ever published; a great achievement and a book of lasting value. It is also good to know that alongside surviving cancer, he has finally been carried off by a good man; not before time.

Alan Bennett · Untold Stories · LRB 30 September 1999 Alan Bennett · Untold Stories · LRB 30 September 1999

Over the course of his distinguished entertainment career, Alan Bennett has received multiple awards and honours, including two BAFTAs, four Laurence Olivier Awards, two Tony Awards, an Academy Award nomination for his film The Madness of King George, and a British Book Award for Author of the Year in 2006. In this four-part collection of his remarkable Untold Stories, the acclaimed writer considers his childhood, career, and the current state of the world with his customary blend of wit and poignancy. The drowning, though, straightaway shed light on an incident early on in my mother’s depression which at the time I’d thought almost a joke. Dad had gone out and we were alone in the house. Motioning me into the passage where we would not be over-heard, she again whispered that she had done something terrible. I was having none of it, but she got hold of my arm, pulled me up the stairs and pointed to the bathroom, though she would not go in. There were six inches of water in the bath. The Broadway Advocacy Coalition / David Byrne's American Utopia / Freestyle Love Supreme / Graciela Daniele (2021) A play could begin like this, I used to think – with a man on-stage, sporadically angry with a woman off-stage, his bursts of baffled invective gradually subsiding into an obstinate silence. Resistant to the offstage entreaties, he continues to ignore her until his persistent refusal to respond gradually tempts the woman into view. The splother attendant on the wedding was harder to get round and Mam’s fear of the occasion persisted until there came a point, Dad told me, when they nearly broke off their engagement because neither of them could see a way of getting over this first necessary hurdle. Eventually Dad sought the advice of the local vicar.We had left Mam at a hospital that morning looking, even after weeks of illness, not much different from her usual self: weeping and distraught, it's true, but still plump and pretty, clutching her everlasting handbag and still somehow managing to face the world. As I followed my father down the ward I wondered why we were bothering: there was no such person here. Bennett is portrayed by British actor Alex Jennings in the 2015 comedy-drama film The Lady in the Van. He appears as himself briefly at the end of the film.