Funny, empathetic and horrifying in equal doses, these three peculiar yet evidently universal monologues, written in the 1980s and 1990s by English playwright Alan Bennett, are given a local twist by actors Lurdes Barba, Imma Colomer and Lina Lambert, each of whom directs the other’s piece.
Performed with nuance and delight, it’s a credit to the 89-year-old playwright, canonical in the UK, that they still work. Reminiscent of his childhood spent in the provinces of England in the 1940s and 1950s, Bennett said that growing up he learned a valuable lesson: that life is generally something that happens elsewhere. If there's one thing that's changed, it is the shifting lens: there's no evading responsibility now, no matter where you live. An inherent tension niggles the plays: that smallness, that inconsequentiality continuously lunges towards issues central to society: gender violence, addiction, masochism, survival by any means.
The three monologues form part of two original series of twelve in total filmed for the BBC in 1988 and 1998. Eight of these plus two new ones were re-recorded with a new all-star cast and broadcast during the pandemic in 2020. This, a time of physical immobility lends its atmosphere well to the plays that deal with various forms of entrapment, whether perceived or actual. Themes interrelate, playing out in different scenarios and with different characters. As Lambert says, “Bennett's lucidity enters the human soul as a laparoscope does the human body. [He] looks at his characters as equals: not with sorrow but with compassion; not with judgment but with empathy.”
Lambert plays Susan in Bed Among the Lentils; she is the bored alcoholic wife of a vicar continuously upstaged by her husband, though she scorns the humiliation. Imma Colomer plays the snobbish Celia in The Hand of God, a reference to the notorious alleged handball by Argentine footballer Diego Maradona in the 1986 World Cup. Cecilia runs an antique shop. Lost in the past, and thinking she has a nose for a bargain, and is delighted when she sells a painting for what she considers a tremendous profit, only to be ‘tricked’ on her own capitalist terms. In Nights in the Gardens of Spain, the most shocking of the three (and of all Bennett's monologues) Lurdes Barba plays Rosemary, a gentle woman with an appalling husband. She befriends Fran, a neighbour driven to murder after years of sexual torture...
