Piss-pots and polemic in Alan Bennett's People

People by Alan Bennett

Lyttleton Theatre, running until April 2013

From dilapidated fur coats to prized chamber pots full of celebrity urine, this play is not afraid to send up the higher echelons of our society. Nor is it afraid to denounce every other aspect of England through the prism of the decaying wealthy, from the voyeurism of National Trust visitors to the banalities of the porn industry.

People’s premise lies in its lamentation of the future of a decrepit stately home, whose fate must be handed over either to the pompous, impervious National Trust, to the money-grabbing, elitist private collector or to be funded by a proliferation of dirty porn films. The inhabitants of the house, Dorothy Stacpoole and her beleaguered companion Iris, are brilliantly portrayed by Frances de la Tour and Linda Bassett. They are relics of a bygone age who wish to let the past decay as they believe it should, rather than have it dredged up and prettified for the commercialised whims of the National Trust. And although this doesn’t always feel like an entirely satisfying alternative to commercial conquest (there is a sense that Bennett can’t quite think of the alternative he would substitute), you root for them throughout.

My main issue with the play was the abundance of clichés. Bennett evidently exploits these consciously in order to dissect and censure the stereotypes of the world he is portraying. But as an audience member they can feel slightly tired and predictable. The play seems caught between a camp musical (typified by the cringingly cheesy sequence of the manor house being swept clean by a bizarre troupe of miming, dancing workmen) and biting satire (in which even the archdeacon’s aspirations include ‘exclusive celebrity eucharists’).

It feels that something is lost in the space between, a sense of subtlety that would give Bennett’s acerbic polemic true resonance. Dorothy fights to assert that Stacpoole Manor ‘is not Allegory House’, but Bennett ironically falls into the trap of metaphorising too strongly. In doing so he loses the nuance of his argument, which is actually a complex blend of pro-conservative preservation as personified by Dorothy and anti-Thatcherite condemnation of the 1980s as a time in which the country became fixated on the monetary value of everything. 

However, I did frequently laugh out loud and also felt a heart-wrenching sadness for the impossible predicament in which Dorothy and Iris find themselves. The play does force you to think about the dismaying decline of our country into a place that now seems to be ‘just a captive market to be exploited’, as Bennett puts it in his enlightening article in the London Review of Books. All the actors play their parts brilliantly, seizing roles that risk obvious caricature and moulding them into believable characters – Miles Jupp as the cloyingly plummy auctioneer and Nicholas le Provost as the bumbling National Trust enthusiast excel at this particularly. Bennett’s scintillating wit and the touching poignancy of Dorothy’s plight ultimately win out to make this play highly enjoyable and disquietingly thought-provoking.

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