The regional show that did float my boat this week was Christopher Luscombe's superlative revival of Alan Bennett's unjustly neglected 1980 comedy Enjoy at the Watford Palace Theatre.

What a dark, invigoratingly absurdist piece this is, half satire, half sentimental journey homewards to the working-class terraces of the author's youth.

In "the last back-to-back in Leeds", bulldozers sweeping through the locality like threshing machines, an ageing couple, Wilfred and Connie Craven, are treated to an unexpected visit from a silent blonde bearing a briefcase and notepad. According to her accompanying leaflet, she's come, at the behest of the council, to study the pair for the purpose of recording their quality and way of life.

This simple conceit yields a rich panoply of jokes at these endearing ancients' expense - as the house-proud, instantly forgetful Connie (Sue Wallace, priceless) frets about keeping up appearances while John Arthur's curmudgeonly codger, confined to his armchair following a hit-and-run, glowers and rages.

The writing, as you'd expect, is pin-sharp - "Don't start yet," Connie pleads with her unspeaking guest, indicating the note-taking, "this isn't typical." What makes Enjoy so treasurable, though, is the way the warm Northern humour incubates a tender domestic pathos that bursts free in the play's final stages to leave you welling up inside.

Prescient and profound, Bennett here nails the Maoist tendencies of local government, Big Brother culture avant la lettre and society's callous treatment of the elderly. The evening even segues into an inspired commentary on the patronising phoniness of the heritage industry.

All that, and some of the best performances you'll find anywhere outside the West End, especially from Carol Macready as busybody neighbour and self-appointed medic Mrs Clegg.

It's only a 15-minute train ride from Euston and a short hike down the station road: in a word, go.


“It’s only a 15-minute train ride from Euston and a short hike down the station road: in a word, go,” wrote Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph a couple of weeks ago in his review of Alan Bennett’s rarely seen Enjoy at Watford Palace Theatre, so I did. And he was right. Except that I went to the last night on Saturday, so you can’t. At least not now. Someone ought to transfer it, though.

It’s a play that I remember seeing in its original, short-lived West End run in 1980 at the Vaudeville Theatre, where it starred Joan Plowright and Colin Blakely. I also tracked it down in a revival at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in 1999 – where the play itself is set, of course, so was doubly moving as it forensically observes an old couple facing re-housing from “the last back-to-back in Leeds”.

When Ian Shuttleworth reviewed that Leeds production for the Financial Times, he wrote, “Alan Bennett was derided for being wilfully surreal when, in 1980, this depiction was first seen of the inhabitants of one of the last back-to-backs in Leeds being transplanted along with their house to a museum park. His last laugh regarding his prophetic acuity has come at the expense of the eradication during the 1980s of the north of England’s industrial culture, but Enjoy is an uncannily prescient play in many respects (although not, sadly, in its vision of the almost universal acceptance of transsexuals).”

It’s interesting to see how time has changed once again. The play’s time truly seems to have come. As Dominic says in his review of the Watford production now, “Prescient and profound, Bennett here nails the Maoist tendencies of local government, Big Brother culture avant la lettre and society’s callous treatment of the elderly. The evening even segues into an inspired commentary on the patronising phoniness of the heritage industry.”

And of course, Bennett is a playwright whose star, too, nowadays is higher than ever. Isn’t it time to allow more people to finally enjoy Enjoy?