Reviews
Daily Telegraph: Dominic Cavendish
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?