The Lady in The Van by Alan Bennett – one of the best contemporary writers, author of The Uncommon Reader http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-uncommon-reader-by-alan-bennett-11.html - 9 out of 10

 

The Lady in The Van by Alan Bennett – one of the best contemporary writers, author of The Uncommon Reader http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-uncommon-reader-by-alan-bennett-11.html

9 out of 10

 

 

Alan Bennett is one of my favorite creators, some of his works (or maybe most of them) are sublime, such as The History Boys http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/06/history-boys-by-alan-bennett-really.html which has among other brilliant lines, exquisite dialogue, wondrous plot, the line “History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.”

 

There is more actually, as the ‘History Boys’ try to get admission into the best universities, the issue of getting the attention of the examiners is taken on, and so ‘the thirty prepuces of Jesus that made the rounds of churches in the Middle Ages’ are mentioned, Alan Bennett is provocative, exceptionally smart, amusing and a spectacular entertainment to read, though The Lady in The Van has many sad undertones

In the aforementioned The Uncommon Reader, the main character is…The Queen, who at some point becomes a reader, which is most unusual for her (late) majesty, who has to go through immensely boring, tiresome schedules, asking people ‘have you come far’, and the outré tome proposes a paradigm shift, wherein her royal highness has a new habit, which changes everything in the palace

 

When I mention a paradigm shift, the definition from The Booker Prize Winner Vernon God Little http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/06/vernon-god-little-by-dbc-pierre-divine.html by fabulous DBC Pierre comes to mind – one character explains to Vernon what this means ‘you enter a room and see a fellow with a finger up your grannie’s ass, what do you think…bastard, I will kill you…but then it is revealed that the man had found about a worm that would have killed your relative, so this is why the scene is in front of you, what now…oh, a hero’

However, the most popular, best known work of Alan Bennett must be The Madness of King George http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-madness-of-king-george-written-by.html adapted for the big screen (like many of his admirable plays and books) with Nigel Hawthorne as the eccentric, maybe mad monarch that keeps saying ‘what, what’ and does bizarre things, passing thought the hands of a primordial analyst, who is imposing pain on the majestic person, until the king appears to regain his faculties and returns to rule

 

The Lady in The Van aka Margaret Fairchild, portrayed by illustrious Maggie Smith, says she will park the vehicle near Alan Bennett’s house for three months, and ends up there for fifteen years, in a complicated relationship with the writer, and the people in the middle class, or perhaps upper middle class neighborhood

 

Maggie Smith has been essential in yet another wonderful production of an Alan Bennett comedy, the exhilarating A Private Function http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-private-function-by-alan-bennett.html where a community living in the countryside, through the deprivation of World War II has some members conspire to raise a…pig, so that it would be slaughtered clandestinely, and then the proceeds would be shared among the small group that cares for, feeds and then kills the poor animal…

Only Maggie Smith’s husband, Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, finds about the secret and then somehow, the animal ends up in the flat of the family, where the wife’s mother lives as well, the latter will get into all sorts of hilarious mischief, for she is absent minded, and often lets out the mystery they try to hide, for if the initial team had been hiding their would be sausages, now they try and find where the pig is, and it is a game of cat and mouse, until they reach some sort of settlement and share the meat, though poor Michael Palin is now very attached to a creature that is more intelligent than cats and dogs

 

The Lady in The Van also reminded me of a few days we have spent in Hungary, on our way back from Belgium, in the early 1990s, when we had been invited by notabilities of Bastogne to spend some weeks there and in Brussels, at the end of which we came back home with two second hand cars, a Volkswagen and a Renault, the latter might be the model the Pope has, which is now some seventy years old, Renault Cinq or something like that, a car that had trouble once we reached the middle of Hungary.

Since it was Friday afternoon or so, we had to wait for the weekend to end, so that we could get somebody to fix the car, and thus had to spend maybe two days, or two nights and nearly three days in the…Van, as in we could not afford to stay in a hotel (if there was one near) or to call ‘Assistance’, some service that would get you to a nonstop shop, and offer you a ride, and things, which would cost more than we had in the world, for this is the time when we emerged from the clutches of Ceausescu, into the Brave New World, a move I helped make, and you have the links and the bragging below

 

Albeit she is an educated lady, she had studied the piano with one of the great, she had showed promise, Margaret Fairchild is now in a bad way, hence in The Van stands for where she lives, just outside the house of the author, eventually, when the local authorites put a warning on the windshield, she moves on the driveway of the writer, and the relationship is tense, then amusing, friendly and antagonistic at times, the woman is not just eccentric, she is hard to tolerate for the common man

 

Now for a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world  – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html