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Theatre

Theatre review: The Shrine & Bed Among The Lentils

Nicholas Hytner’s nimble response to the pandemic was to revive Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues, first for the BBC and now for his theatre

September 10, 2020 12:36
Monica Dolan
2 min read

Nicholas Hytner’s nimble response to the pandemic was to revive Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues of 1988 and 1998, first for the BBC and now for his theatre where eight of the short plays are being performed in pairs.

In the first of these Monica Dolan and then Lesley Manville deliver mesmerising portraits of women in discreet crisis. The calm with which Dolan’s Lorna sits at her kitchen table pouring belies grief; the contempt with which Manville’s vicar’s wife speaks of her fellow female parishioners reveals a seething anger.

Early in in the first play it emerges that Lorna’s husband Clifford was killed when crashing his motorbike on a country lane during one of his birdwatching trips. Her visits to the scene are more an attempt to understand her own absence of emotion than to pay tribute to the man who she loved very deeply.

The sheep may have witnessed the accident that the police, she notes, insist on calling an incident. The place is “nowhere” she observes. “But him dying there has made it a real place.”