The Lady in the Van

seen 14 November 2015

The film concerns Miss Shepherd, who lived in a van in the street where Alan Bennett lived in Camden Town. Eventually, in a quixotic gesture prompted partly by exasperation with the disturbance of witnessing several uncalled for attacks on her, and partly because new parking restrictions would render her roadside position untenable, he suggested that she park her van in his driveway, an arrangement which lasted for 15 years until Miss Shepherd died.

Alan Bennett wrote an account of the peculiar relationship between himself, a private and rather timid writer, and this indomitable woman, about whom he knew virtually nothing, as she rarely volunteered personal information. This account first appeared in various editions of the London Review of Books, and was finally published as a book, and then turned by him into a play, in which he cunningly split his own persona into two acting parts - one for the person to whom the events happened and one for the writer observing it all. 

This conceit is repeated in the film, which is a further adaptation of the play, the book, and the real events. Alex Jennings plays Bennett (both writer and participant), and Maggie Smith repeats her stage role as Miss Shepherd. The film was directed by Nicholas Hytner (who also directed the stage play) and was shot largely on location in the street and house where Bennett lived (though he is no longer resident there).

The film is well made, and the two leading performers are convincing - Alex Jennings has caught the Bennett voice, and the constant diffidence which only occasionally snaps (most often in the presence of a supercilious care worker), while Maggie Smith portrays the stubbornness, waywardness and occasional vulnerability of an elderly and extremely eccentric woman, who by the end of her life was essentially a vagrant. Needless to say there is a backstory, but it is only sketchily revealed, reflecting the fact that Bennett himself only ascertained certain facts after Miss Shepherd's death, and so they were in a sense at second hand.

The film has a certain artificiality about it, due to the double presence of the Bennett character. A.B. and Alan often talk to one another, arguing whether the situation merits writing about - or whether in fact it has been in part contrived by him simply because it is a good subject for writing. So it is not a conventionally told story, marked most obviously by an extremely whimsical ending in which Miss Shepherd ascends to heaven, welcomed by a god who would not be out of place in a Monty Python animation. This flight of fancy - posited as the result of an authorial licence which one is thus led to suppose has been tightly restrained for most of the film - reminds us that the film is by no means meant to be seen as either a documentary or a 'biopic'.

A further example of playfulness is the casting of minor parts, which can be a little distracting as more and more recognisable faces have brief moments on the screen. Particularly noticeable for those aware of Bennett's major stage successes are the presence of no less than seven of the original eight 'History Boys' - Jamie Parker, Russell Tovey, Dominic Cooper, James Corden, Sacha Dhawan, and Samuel Anderson, and two of the teachers, Frances de la Tour (as Ursula Vaughan Williams) and Stephen Campbell Moore (as a doctor treating Alan Bennett's mother). Geoffrey Streatfield, who took over from Campbell Moore for part of the original 'History Boys' run, also appears in this film. Alex Jennings himself played Benjamin Britten in Bennett's later play 'The Habit of Art', in which Frances de la Tour also took part.

In short, it is a fascinating story and a well-made film, but it is also not taking itself entirely seriously, or, looked at from another point of view, it is gently reminding us that all attempts to render lived experience as drama have a degree of artifice about them