He is, according to the papers, a national treasure. Also a "national teddy bear" (Francis Wheen), "prose laureate" (David Thomson), "curmudgeon laureate" (Mark Jones), and Oracle of Little England (Matthew Norman).
Alan Bennett's new play, The History Boys, is previewing at the National (and still, apparently, being rewritten) so the attempted canonisations have begun again. Last week he became the Bard of British Loneliness which, says Nicholas Hytner, who is directing, "caused us all a great deal of merriment".
Michael Frayn, no stranger to fame himself, tells a story of his youngest daughter, at about 15, asking him "in an exasperated way, 'Why can't you be famous, dad, like Alan Bennett?'" It's partly, says Frayn, who did national service with Bennett and has been a friend ever since, because Bennett has always been a performer as well as a writer, appearing on TV, on stage. Partly it's because he is "incapable of writing a dull line", says Hytner (who's directing a Bennett premiere for the fifth time). "There's his feel for dialogue, and, more particularly, his feel for the workings of the mind and heart, and how they're related. That's why he is so trusted and respected by the audience. They know they're not going to be dicked around."
But there is more to it than this. In mid-June, Bennett, who turned 70 on Sunday, will be appearing at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown festival. He was invited to perform by this year's curator, Morrissey, who counts the playwright as one of his idols. Morrissey's biographer, Mark Simpson, suspects that he admires "Bennett's Englishness (really a form of northerness), which is funny, self-mocking, stubborn, sharp and anti-Establishment." It's as though Bennett provides for his fans a particular, alternative, national identity.
The little that we know about The History Boys is that it is set in a school, among sixth-formers studying English and history. Thirty-six years ago Bennett's first play, Forty Years On, was also set in a school, Albion House, a minor southern public school that serves as "a loose metaphor for England". It began with a speech by the outgoing headmaster that's typical Bennett: high pomp quickly undercut by bathos, often related to bodily functions.
His only other historical play, The Madness of King George III (1991), may be about royalty, but it turns on the contents of a chamberpot.
Forty Years On contains many schoolboy jokes, Bennett's trademark slick one-liners. "Mark my words," says the headmaster, "when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall." But the headmaster is not entirely a figure of fun. He stands for "a kind of constructed nostalgia," says Frayn, "for an England Bennett had never known, and in a part of society he would never have been part of even if he had been alive. It's one of the things that makes the play interesting, that it's both for this traditional England, and mocking it at the same time."
Forty Years On, with John Gielgud as headmaster, was a West End hit. It was followed by some more naturalistic plays, the Kafka plays, the spy plays, and much TV, which all, except for the occasional hiccup, did well; many feel, however, that the Talking Heads series of monologues (1988 and 1998) is his best work. Now taught at A Level, and the most successful talking books of all time, they hoisted Bennett to an entirely different level of fame. And they are about another kind of England altogether.
Bennett was born and grew up in Leeds, where his father was a butcher and amateur musician; his parents, funny and quick at home, were self-effacing, uneasy in public. Bennett soon learned the Larkin-esque lesson "that life is generally something that happens elsewhere", and the Talking Heads are set where life, by this assessment, doesn't happen: country vicarages, suburbs.
Most feature women, and while the stories differ, the loved, but guilt-inducing figure of Bennett's mother, who suffered Alzheimer's and died in a home, hovers over much of his work. The monologues, awash in regret and disappointment, are tragic, claustrophobic and very funny. "I think they are a real artistic development," says Frayn. "It's the finest thing you can do as a writer, to get the material down to absolutely the living nerve, the heart of the work, and nothing else at all."
Bennett escaped via Cambridge, briefly, and Oxford, where for a while he became a history don, and then through Beyond the Fringe. Though in his autobiographical collection, Writing Home, he is quick to qualify his parents' assumption that "education was a passport to social ease" - "it was class and temperament, not want of education, that held their tongues" - the point remains that while education may not make you better at parties, it means far more than how much you know.
Among the many things that horrified him about the Thatcher regime was student loans: he knew that he, and other grammar school boys, such as Frayn, were given a future by not having to pay for university. One hears The History Boys may be set in the early 80s; it would be surprising if this were not at least mentioned. Bennett is not, at the moment, much happier with Blair than he was with Thatcher.
In A Shameful Year, his latest annual diary in the London Review of Books, he revealed that, after a non-marching lifetime (except once, by accident), he had marched twice against the invasion of Iraq.
Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the LRB and a long-time neighbour, characterises his position as consistent with his strong anti-appeasement views of the second-world war: the Suez crisis and this Gulf war, he feels, are blatant misuses of the anti-appeasement argument. He was taken to task by John Lloyd, and called a "hysterical schoolgirl" by another reader. Wilmers sees nothing unusual in this: "Infantile is always the adjective applied to the left by its critics; it's used of him and it's used by people writing to the paper to cancel their subscriptions."
There is a central, much-stated paradox to Bennett: he refuses to be interviewed, and yet so much of his work is personal (not to mention Writing Home, which runs to 612 pages). This creates a hall of mirrors in which he seems both known and unknown. An incident during the run of The Lady in the Van, in which he appears, avec doppelganger, is characteristic: one night, Bennett 1 (Nicholas Farrell) was indisposed, so Bennett stepped in as himself. Kevin McNally (Bennett 2) later confided to the BBC that "he's not a very good Alan Bennett, actually". There is a well-tended hedge dividing Bennett the image from Bennett the man.
In a diary entry for August 10, 1994, he remembered being bored by Stephen Spender retelling stories he'd already published: "There's very little in the back of the shop is the message: now it's all out on the shelves, the best plan is to pipe down." In 1993, the New Yorker had discovered that there was more in the back of the shop than anyone, even close friends, suspected: Bennett had been having a relationship with Anne Davies, originally his cleaning lady, for over 10 years.
This despite a 1987 demand from Ian McKellen that he declare whether he was gay. Bennett famously retorted that this was like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water. "I was rather pleased with that," said Bennett later. "It put him in his place as well." Which perhaps tells us more about Bennett than the existence or otherwise of a sex life. He now lives with Rupert Thomas, editor of World of Interiors.
Bennett has been known to complain that he is not taken as seriously as some of his peers, and a 1998 National Theatre ranking of the century's greatest playwrights didn't even place him in the top 20. There is, of course, the worry that, fairly or otherwise, has always dogged him - that he can't resist a joke. But the critic David Thomson, an admirer of Bennett's, sees something more.
"I think his vision is very local in terms of place and time and class. He's absolutely brilliant at getting the wistful collapse of a certain kind of British middle-class sensibility, but when that feeling has passed, people may look back and say, 'What was that about?' I'm not sure he will travel in time, because I'm not sure his work is about more than a certain kind of refined eloquence, a very touching self-pity."
And he worries that the plays lack the increasing moral indignation evident in Bennett's diaries, for example, "an anger about the way England has gone. Maybe the new play will be a revelation".
In his well-modulated tetchiness about property developers, cars, Classic FM, Bennett is increasingly coming to resemble his headmaster in 40 Years On. Yet the further paradox is that in the headmaster's nostalgia for a lost England, there rings a very contemporary note: "To let: A valuable site at the cross-roads of the world. At present on offer to European clients. Outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants. Of some historical and period interest. Some alterations and improvements necessary."
Life in short
Born May 9 1934
Education Leeds Modern school; Oxford University
Career Theatre includes: Beyond the Fringe (Royal Lyceum Edinburgh 1960, Fortune London 1961, NYC 1962); Forty Years On (Apollo) 1968, Getting On (Queen's) 1971, Habeas Corpus (Lyric) 1973, Kafka's Dick (Royal Court) 1986, An Englishman Abroad (also dir, NT) 1988, Wind in the Willows (adaptation, RNT) 1990, The Madness of George III (RNT) 1991-93, The Lady in the Van 1999
Television includes: On the Margin (series) 1966, A Day Out 1972, Sunset Across the Bay 1975, A Little Outing, A Visit from Miss Prothero 1977, Doris and Doreen 1978, One Fine Day 1979, The Insurance Man 1986, Talking Heads (series) 1988
Films include: A Private Function 1984, Prick Up Your Ears 1987, The Madness of King George 1995
Books include: Forty Years On 1969, Getting On 1972, Writing Home 1994,Telling Tales 2000