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MovieMail's Review
David Parkinson gives high praise to this exceptional set of previously uncollected works for the BBC from a British national treasure.
Although he's best known for erudite everyday dramas, Alan Bennett has always been a history boy at heart. Indeed, four of the works in this exceptional collection focus on complex factual figures, including John Schlesinger's wittily melancholic profiles of the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, An Englishman Abroad (1983) and A Question of Attribution (1991).
The first utilises a wintry Dundee to recreate Coral Browne's visit to Burgess in Moscow in 1958. With its discussion of the transience of newsworthiness and the even crueller brevity of celebrity, this is both charmingly old-fashioned and curiously contemporary. As played by Alan Bates, Burgess is a patriot who bitterly destests his exile while remaining utterly unrepentant of his treachery. He is much more concerned about being a topic of dinner conversation and procuring a new suit than he is about Cold War ideology. And James Fox's Blunt is equally indifferent to his past misdemeanours, as he's interrogated by MI5, investigates a hidden character in Titian's painting, `An Allegory of Prudence' and chats with razor-sharp civility with Prunella Scales's Elizabeth II in the Buckingham Palace picture gallery.
Despite its haphazard chronology, this urbane drama offered a shrewd insight into Blunt's motives and vanity and Bennett proved just as incisive in fathoming the mind of the French novelist Marcel Proust in Udayan Prasad's 102 Blvd Haussman (1991). Alan Bates again impresses as the famously fastidious recluse, whose dependence upon Janet McTeer's maid is rooted in both affection and a penchant for manipulation that sees him try to keep her from a husband on leave from the trenches and she attempt to thwart his lust for one of the musicians he'd hired to perform Franck's `Quartet in D'.
Bennett supposedly sought to show here that artists were barely human, as though he was reneging on his sympathetic portrait of Franz Kafka in Richard Eyre's The Insurance Man (1986). But Daniel Day Lewis's bid to help Robert Hines claim for an industrial injury is thwarted by Jim Broadbent's officious bureaucrat and the action takes on the ominous mood of impending doom that characterised Bennett's first tele-play, A Day Out (1972), which followed a Halifax cycling club's trip to Fountains Abbey in 1911.
Bennett reunited with director Stephen Frears for Sunset Across the Bay (1975), as he drew inspiration from his own parents for the Leeds pensioners retiring to Morecambe and hit upon the deceptively chatty style that would characterise A Visit from Miss Prothero (1978), Our Winnie and A Woman of No Importance (both 1982). The latter was the first of Bennett's trademark talking head dramas, with Patricia Routledge excelling as the garrously genial office busybody who sustains her delusional sense of worth after she's unexpectedly hospitalised. But Bennett was always a small-screen innovator, as he demonstrated with his own participation in the documentaries Dinner at Noon (1988) and Portrait or Bust (1994), which complete this must-have set.
Features a selection of his previously unreleased BBC material. It will contain a mix of his best known plays and observational pieces and contains:
A Visit from Miss Prothero, Sunset Across the Bay, A Day Out, A Woman of No Importance, Our Winnie, An Englishman Abroad, Dinner at Noon, The Insurance Man, 102 Bvd Haussman, A Question of Attribution and Portrait or Bust.
