Enjoy

After Complicit at the Old Vic, I'm feeling a little wary of plays with one-word titles.  Enjoy is a 1980 play by Alan Bennett which flopped so resoundingly that he abandoned writing for the theatre for several years. Well, every playwright is allowed one flop, and Bennett has had far fewer than most.  I would love to be able to write a play that was half as good as most of his output.  But Enjoy has serious flaws, and it's a tribute to this production by Christopher Luscombe from the Theatre Royal Bath that the play succeeds as well as it does.  That's largely due to a cracking performance by Alison Steadman as Connie Craven and an equally fine effort by David Troughton as her husband Wilfred.  They're an elderly couple in a Leeds back-to-back who are about to be rehoused as part of a slum clearance.  Through the letterbox falls a note from the council announcing they are to be visited by an observer to record their vanishing way of life.  A silent blonde woman with a notebook installs herself in their parlour.  In through the front door, for no particular reason, come the couple's sluttish daughter Linda, a neighbourhood skinhead and various other visitors with notebooks.  Wilfred, the disabled victim of a hit-and-run driver, appears to succumb to a thump on the head from the skinhead and Connie and her neighbour try to clean up the corpse as their parents' generation might have done, only to be stopped in their tracks by the unconscious Wilfred's erection.  Linda tries to make love on the carpet to the chauffeur who is about to whisk her away to a rendezvous with a Saudi Arabian prince. Why?  It's not clear.   Bennett's problem is that he never quite decided which of several plays he was trying to write, and the result is a strange mish-mash.  There's a strong echo of Joe Orton in lines such as 'He's always believed in progress -- he had false teeth when he was 27.'  But the amoral Orton thought all values were a joke, while Bennett is obsessed by them.  Some critics have argued that Bennett was ahead of his time in introducing the idea of a Big Brother-style team of watchers whose presence in the room distorts and changes the behaviour of the people who are being watched.  But I think that the real difference is that a 2009 audience much better tuned in to Bennett's autobiographical wavelength after reading his memoirs about his parents.  Steadman's Connie, whose short-term memory is playing her tricks, has the resolute optimism of someone in the early stages of dementia who can only concentrate on one thing at a time.  Linda, more prostitute than personal secretary, seems to have strayed into the play from an early draft of Talking Heads;  and it's no surprise when the oddly androgynous woman observer turns out to be the couple's cross-dressing lost son.  This play has echoes of the absurdist tradition of the mid-20th century (N.F. Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle) which influenced Stoppard and many other playwrights, but the tone of Bennett's writing swings around wildly.  There's a lot of autobiography struggling to get out which he managed much better in prose in the 1990s;  there's an Ortonesque farce about a corpse with an inconvenient erection; and there's a social comedy about the way northern working class life has been mummified and sanitised by the heritage industry.  Unfortunately the different elements don't gel.  The programme reveals that Bennett made a lot of cuts in the original play for this production;  perhaps the ending might have been better omitted altogether.  Despite being perched in the back of the Gielgud Theatre's grand circle, about 250 yards from the stage, I have to say I enjoyed my evening a great deal more than my visit to the Old Vic for Complicit.  Even a bad play by Alan Bennett is better than a good play by most other writers.