Alan Bennett Plays 1

This collection of Alan Bennett's work includes his first play and West End hit, Forty Years On, as well as Getting On, Habeus Corpus, and Enjoy.

Forty Years On

'Alan Bennett's most gloriously funny play ... a brilliant, youthful perception of a nation in decline, as seen through the eyes of a home-grown school play ... a classic.' Daily Mail

Getting On

Winner of the Evening Standard Best Comedy Award in 1971, Getting on is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law in dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a self-esteeming joke.

Habeus Corpus

'After two elegiac comedies about the decline of old England, Mr Bennett has now written a gorgeously vulgar but densely plotted facre that is a downright celebration of sex and the human body ... a combination of hurtling action with verbal brilliance.' Guardian

Enjoy

Enjoy uncannily foresaw the attitudes to English working-class life now enshrined in themeparks. 'The classic tug in Bennett between childhod Yorkshire and intellectual sophistication has never been better, or more daringly expressed.' Observer



Alan Bennett first appeared on the stage in 1960 as one of the authors and performers of the revue Beyond the Fringe. His stage plays include Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, The Old Country and The Lady in the Van, and he has written many television plays, notably A Day Out, Sunset Across the Bay, A Woman of No Importance and the series of monologues Talking Heads. An adaptation of his television play, An Englishman Abroad, was paired with A Question of Attribution in the double-bill Single Spies, first produced at the National Theatre in 1988. This was followed in 1990 by his adaptation of The Wind in the Willows and in 1991 by The Madness of George III.

His most recent play, The History Boys, won the Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play, The Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, and The South Bank Award. Alan Bennett's latest collection of prose, Untold Stories, was published in 2005 by Faber and Faber and Profile Books.