Small Voices

AuthorAlan Bennett

Alan Bennett (b1934)

Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire. He graduated with a first-class degree in history at Oxford where he performed comedy with a number of eventually successful actors in the Oxford Revue. He remained at the university for several years, where he researched and taught Medieval History. In 1960, Bennett appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe. Bennett's first stage play, Forty Years On directed by Patrick Garland was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio plays followed, along with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose and broadcasting, and many appearances as an actor.

Many of Bennett's characters are unfortunate and downtrodden, or meek and overlooked. Life has brought them to an impasse, or else passed them by altogether. In many cases they have met with disappointment in the realm of sex and intimate relationships, largely through tentativeness and a failure to connect with others. Bennett is both unsparing and compassionate in laying bare his characters' frailties. This can be seen in his television plays for LWT in the late 1970s and the BBC in the early 1980s, and in the 1987 Talking Heads series of monologues for television which were later performed at the Comedy Theatre in London in 1992. This was a sextet of poignantly comic pieces, each of which depicted several stages in the character's decline from an initial state of denial or ignorance of their predicament, through a slow realisation of the hopelessness of their situation, and progressing to a bleak or ambiguous conclusion. A second set of six Talking Heads pieces followed a decade later.

In his 2005 prose collection 'Untold Stories' Bennett wrote candidly and movingly of the mental illness that afflicted his mother and other family members. Much of his work draws on his Leeds background, and his stage play 'The Lady in the Van' was based on his experiences with a tramp called Miss Shepherd who lived on his driveway in several dilapidated vans for over fifteen years. In 1994 Bennett adapted his popular and much-praised 1991 play The Madness of George III for the cinema which received four Academy Award nominations. His critically-acclaimed The History Boys won three Laurence Olivier Awards in February 2005. Bennett himself received the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Theatre.

Bennett was made an Honorary Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford in 1987. He was also awarded a D.Litt by the University of Leeds in 1990 and a hon PhD from Kingston in 1996. However in 1998 he refused an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, in protest at its accepting funding for a named chair in honour of press baron Rupert Murdoch. He also declined a CBE in 1988 and a knighthood in 1996. He earned Honorary Membership of The Coterie in the 2007 membership list. In 2008 Bennett donated his entire archive of working papers, unpublished manuscripts, diaries and books to the Bodleian Library. It was a gesture of thanks repaying a debt he felt he owed to the UK's social welfare system that had given him educational opportunities which his humble family background would otherwise never have afforded.