Enjoy
Gielgud
Entertaining Mr Sloane
Trafalgar Studio
A View from the Bridge
Duke of York’s
How does he get away with it? The main target of Alan Bennett’s 1980 comedy Enjoy is disability. Ageing Connie has pre-senile dementia and her husband Wilf is partially paralysed and prone to blackouts. Their condemned terraced house is about to be flattened by their progressive council who’ve sent in a sociologist to record the slum-dwellers’ behaviour for posterity. Shaken from their habitual indolence, Connie and Wilf blunder about the house bickering ignorantly while the mute observer takes notes. Bennett’s game-plan here seems to be to mock penniless, narrow-minded, crippled northerners for the amusement of affluent, sophisticated, able-bodied southerners yet he manages to avoid opprobrium — partly because his writing has an indefinable charm and partly because southerners wrongly identify his genteel Leeds accent as working-class and assume that these characters are his peers, when in fact they’re from the class beneath him.
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