Alan Bennett(1934–)

Alan Bennett was born at 92a Tong Road, Armley, on the working-class west side of Leeds, on 9 May 1934, second son of Walter Bennett, a Co-operative Society butcher at the Leeds Headingley branch, and Lilian Mary Peel. The family was a Yorkshire Co-operative-Wholesale-Society household, Methodist by attendance, broadly Labour-voting; the boys were the first in either side of the family to take the eleven-plus and the second was sent through to Leeds Modern School and the Joint Services School for Linguists at Cambridge under the wartime intensive Russian-language scheme. He came down from Cambridge in 1957 having taken a first in medieval history at Exeter College, Oxford (he had moved up to Oxford from the Cambridge linguists' school for the actual undergraduate degree), and was working as a junior medieval-history lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1960 when his fellow Oxford-medieval undergraduate Dudley Moore brought him into the Oxford-Cambridge revue team being assembled by John Bassett of the Edinburgh Festival.

*Beyond the Fringe* opened at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, on the late-night fringe of the 1960 Edinburgh International Festival on 22 August 1960. The team was four men: Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller from Cambridge, Dudley Moore and Bennett from Oxford. The hour-long revue, written by all four across the eight weeks of the previous summer at small lunchtime sessions in Cook's London flat and at Bennett's mother's house at Headingley, used the language and the production register of the Cambridge Footlights and the Oxford Etceteras (rapid-fire sketch comedy, two-handers of fixed-personality types, the upper-class twit and the lower-class servant) and aimed it at the institutions the satirical voice of British comedy had previously been protected by: the royal family, the parish church, the Conservative cabinet, the boarding school, the Second World War officer caste. The revue ran the Edinburgh fringe through August 1960, transferred to the Fortune Theatre on the London West End in May 1961, ran there for two years, transferred to Broadway at the John Golden Theatre in October 1962 and ran there for fourteen months. The British and American 1960s satirical-comedy revolution is now usually dated from it.

He did not, by his own subsequent account, want a career as a comedian. He left the team in 1964 at the end of the Broadway run, refused the BBC's offer of a four-team comedy series spin-off (which Cook, Miller and Moore took up as *Not Only But Also* without him), moved into a bedsitting flat at Halliwick House, Camden Town in north London and started writing the working-stage plays of the next decade. *Forty Years On* at the Apollo, 1968 (Sir John Gielgud as the headmaster); *Habeas Corpus* at the Lyric Hammersmith, 1973 (Alec Guinness as the doctor); *The Old Country* at the Queen's, 1977 (Alec Guinness again, as the Burgess-Maclean-Philby-figure defector in his Moscow apartment). The plays sold; the stage register he had developed by the late 1970s was, on every contemporary working playwright's account, the most distinctive voice on the British stage of the period: the ironic Yorkshire-northern phrasing applied to the upper-middle-class subjects of the post-war English liberal establishment.

*Talking Heads* came in 1988. The brief from the BBC's Innes Lloyd was for six twenty-five-minute monologue television-plays for the Sunday-evening BBC One *Play for Today* slot. Bennett wrote the six (*A Chip in the Sugar*, *A Lady of Letters*, *Bed Among the Lentils*, *Soldiering On*, *Her Big Chance*, *A Cream Cracker Under the Settee*) at the Camden flat across the summer of 1987, on the working principle that a television monologue could carry the entire emotional structure of a small-scale realistic novel without ever showing more than one face on the screen. The transmission in spring 1988 took the Sunday-evening BBC One audience by surprise; the second series in 1998 (*A Bed Among the Lentils*'s six successor monologues) was effectively expected. The Bennett monologue register has been the English-language model for the form ever since, taught on every postgraduate British television-writing course as the foundational text.

He came out publicly as gay in the 2004 *Untold Stories* memoir, at seventy. The long partner of the second half of his life is the *World of Interiors* magazine editor Rupert Thomas; they have lived between the Camden house and a cottage at Clapham Yorkshire (the village above Settle in the Yorkshire Dales, where his mother had retired) since the late 1990s. *The History Boys* (2004) at the National Theatre and on Broadway under Nicholas Hytner's direction won three Olivier Awards and six Tony Awards including Best Play. He is the only contemporary British playwright to have been read aloud, in extracts, on the principal national-radio Sunday-evening serial-reading slot (the Radio 4 *Book at Bedtime*) for over thirty consecutive years. The Bennett name in its English-side catalogue is the medieval patronymic of Benedict, the Latin-Christian *blessed*, compressed into the standard English short form across the parish registers of the Middle Ages; he carries it from a Leeds Co-operative butcher's family into the centre of the English literary establishment of the second half of the twentieth century.