Alan Bennett is a British national treasure even if he does have a tendency to hoist HRH on her own staff. The "quiet Beatle" of the Beyond the Fringe comedy conspiracy of the sixties (with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller), Bennett went on his quietly prolific way to write for theater and for the screen, large and small. Certainly he has made British television worth living for. The television plays and films of Alan Bennett featured in our month-long series include two films directed by John Schlesinger, An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution, well loved by audiences of the San Francisco International Film Festival at PFA; the six Talking Heads, BBC plays for one actor; and a series of films for London Weekend Television produced and directed by Stephen Frears. As both writer and actor, Bennett's dry humor gives voice to the humor and dryness of everyday existence in England. A veritable smithy of dialogue, so his characters are given the blessing and sometimes the weapon of the word; the perfectly turned phrase cuts deep, even when you are talking to yourself. These characters embody a particularly British nostalgia for hygiene and an inane obsession with The Office-as if together they might ward off the inevitable, storms in mental teacups, chips in emotional sugar bowls. Nor does the Yorkshire-born Bennett stoop to conquer; rather, he has embraced his dubious heroes: "Passive, dejected, at odds with themselves, they are that old friend, the Writer in Disguise."
