WILFRED CRAVEN	Colin Blakely
CONNIE CRAVEN	Joan Plowright
Ms. CRAIG	Philip Sayer
LINDA CRAVEN	Susan Littler
HERITAGE	Roger Alborough
ANTHONY	Julian Ronnie
GREGORY	Stephen Flynn
MRS. CLEGG	Liz Smith
ADRIAN	Graham Wyles
SID	Michael Hughes
HARMAN	Marc Sinden
CHARLES	Simon Painter
ROLAND	Gareth Price

Reviewed on transfer to the West End

Alan Bennett, most acute of all observers of the British class system, wades confidently into ever deeper water in his latest play Enjoy at the Vaudeville, and steps out, to a certain extent, dripping of two writers who have trodden the murkier ways of human nature before him, Joe Orton and Samuel Beckett. It is just as well not to stretch the Beckett analogy too far, though there are one or two occasions towards the end of the play when the stage pictures produced by director Ronald Eyre strikingly recall Beckett images. The Orton connection is rather stronger, when what one might call the private parts of human activity are laughingly exposed with a bitter expression of futility.

But these come in the second act of the play, the first half being more in the familiar Bennett vein, as he shows the older generation attempting to come to terms with modern life and its manipulative aspects. Wilfred and Connie Craven, he semi-paralysed through an encounter with a hit-and-run driver, she rapidly losing her memory, live in the last back-to-back in Leeds, surrounded by urban redevelopment and ready to be rehoused in a council maisonette. Before they move, however, someone in authority has thought it would be a good idea if they and their few surviving neighbours were to be observed by a team of silent social workers with a view to ensuring that the best of their traditional way of life should go with them. Much of the play is concerned with the Cravens’ desire to live up to the expectations of the social workers one of whom is their own transvestite son. The rest shows them deluding themselves in a variety of ways, one being that their daughter is not a tart but a jet-setting private secretary.

Subtly, and aided by two outstanding performances from Joan Plowright and Colin Blakely, Alan Bennett drags us from a cosily eccentric world into the bleakest of prospects in which personal responsibility is replaced by state “caring”. Though many might be disconcerted by the fact that an evening that begins with chuckles ends disturbingly, Enjoy is an important play with real social relevance. And if its stars carry the burden, there are some sharply illuminating supporting performances by Philip Sayer and Susan Littler as the younger Cravens, Liz Smith as a neighbour who is never at a loss and Marc Sinden as the cheerfully chilling director of a project which treats people as units.