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Friday, Jun 13, 1997
A Visit from Miss Protheroe and Doris and Doreen
Tonight's selection is a Patricia Routledge feast, if not an overdose. The personification of the Bennett bureaucrat who buys into the pretensions of office life like other people buy groceries, still, in each performance she creates an entirely different character heading toward her own destiny. A Visit from Miss Protheroe (Stephen Frears, U.K., 1978) Arthur Dodsworth (Hugh Lloyd), a widower, is content in retirement-a brave new world of pottery and cooking classes makes him wonder how he stuck it all those years. That is, until a former colleague, Miss Peggy Protheroe (Patricia Routledge), drops by. Miss Protheroe "was one of those people who only saw jokes by appointment." Like a picador she pricks Mr. Dodsworth's interest in that which he had put behind him; valiantly he resists, even putting on a record of "A Man and a Woman" to distract them both. But Arthur's fragile illusions are no match for Miss P's hidden agenda. Stephen Frears's direction is a dance, Bennett's voice-over narrator a one-man Greek chorus whose warnings only we can hear. Written by Alan Bennett. With Patricia Routledge, Hugh Lloyd. (30 mins)Doris and Doreen (Stephen Frears, U.K., 1978) Set in a provincial office of a large firm, Doris and Doreen is a chamber piece that turns gothic for two clerical workers (Routledge and Prunella Scales) who sense mysterious forces mounting against them. Amid the pink forms and the green forms, the constant threat of cutbacks reinforces the nagging fear that one is indeed redundant. When the seemingly guileless Doreen (Routledge) begins to suspect "we have a little problemette," the practical Doris (Scales) digs in her heels. A hilarious and chilling meeting of Waiting for Godot and "Work Makes Free."
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