Issues of Trust

An orgy of navel-gazing on the South Bank where a national treasure is satirising the National Trust at the National Theatre. Alan Bennett sets his latest comedy in the drawing room of a crumbling Georgian mansion in South Yorkshire. Greedy speculators are queuing up to seize the house from its plucky owner, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole, a high-born hippie who spent her youth going to parties and modelling. Now aged 80 or 90, she’s ill equipped to outwit the circling vultures.

Bennett is good at creating warm, believable women but with Lady Dorothy he simply regurgitates a stale theatrical burp: the beatnik with a bus pass. Writing plots has never been his strong point and he unwisely stuffs his story with fistfuls of loose threads. They poke out all over the place. Former lovers appear from nowhere. The sale of priceless treasures may, or may not, save Lady Dorothy from destitution. The estate is about to sink into a disused mine-works.