Feature: Interview - Alan Bennett talks to Piers Plowright

Published: 16 December, 2010
by MATTHEW LEWIN

WHILE there remains a divide between public and private education, Britain will remain split down the middle, and it will go on like that until the rift is healed.

That’s the view of playwright Alan Bennett, speaking at a Lifelines event at Burgh House last Thursday when he was interviewed by former BBC producer Piers Plowright.

Asked for his views on the current student protests about tuition fees, Mr Bennett said: “I seem to be much to the left of everybody on this issue.

“My own education was at a state school in Leeds and I later went to Oxford, but at no point in my education did my parents have to pay a penny – to the extent that you didn’t even think about it. And that seems to me the ideal situation, and I still don’t quite understand why that isn’t the situation now,” said Mr Bennett, who lives in Primrose Hill.

“I don’t believe in private education at all. I believe that in 1944 when they reformed the education system, they funked it.

“There should have been some attempt to amalgamate private and state education, even if only at the sixth-form level, and then gradually that might have spread and the two systems could have come together.

“Blair could have done it in 1997 with his majority, but he was disinclined to do it, and I just feel that while we have state education and private education, the country will remain split down the middle, and it will go on like that until the rift is healed.”

Asked whether he was a republican, Mr Bennett replied: “Absolutely not! I sometimes think I’m the Queen’s only supporter; I think she’s wonderful. But I’ve never met her, although I’ve met Prince Charles once or twice.

“I couldn’t think of anything worse than some tired politician becoming president of a republic. Perhaps if someone totally unsuitable ended up on the throne I might think differently, but not with the Queen, and not with Prince Charles, about whom my experience has been that he really works so hard and is so conscientious about things that you could forgive him anything, really.

“The Queen is fun to write about because you don’t have to do anything like explain to the audience who she is, or what she’s like. They know what she’s like. You just have to tweak it very slightly and it’s all done. You know how she talks, and you just need to edge it slightly and it’s all done for you.”

Had the Queen been to see any of his plays?

“Well, she came to Beyond The Fringe all those years ago, and she didn’t like it. She never cracked a smile, and I don’t think she’s come since. “But Charles and Camilla come and are very good to have in an audience, because they guffaw. Royalty often puts a real damper on an audience, but they don’t and they really get things going.”

Earlier Mr Bennett said that he had known at the time when he, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were doing Beyond the Fringe that he was not cut out to be an academic.

“Even while the show was still on I had been doing some research in the public library in Edinburgh, and some teaching at Oxford.

“But there was a gradual weaning away from academic life – I think the final thing that persuaded that I wouldn’t have been a good academic is the fact that my memory isn’t very good.”

He revealed that his favourite books when he was young were the William books by Richmal Crompton.

“I never read the classics like Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh until I had to read them for the BBC, but I did read the William books. The wonderful thing about that was that there were always more – you never came to the end. I just loved them. I knew nothing about Richmal Crompton – I think I probably thought she was a man.

A number of his plays have been about spies and treachery, and Mr Plowright asked him about these themes.

“It’s always assumed that it’s to do with my being gay and that the treachery and the hidden personalities is a metaphor for that.

“But it never seemed to me to be the case when I was writing them. The thing that drew me both to Blunt and to Burgess was that they were class renegades. They were betraying their class; having been brought up through public schools and were right in the heart of the establishment and moved at the top level of social life.  And yet there was something else, and that’s what fascinated me.

“Also, particularly with Burgess, writing about him in exile in Moscow, it was a way of being able to get a perspective on England. And he could talk about England in a way that would be very hard to do if he was still in England.”

Mr Bennett said that he was now an agnostic, but there had been a period between the age of 15 and 20 when he had been very religious.

“Like a lot of people I’m sympathetic to the CoE because of the way I was brought up. I like hymns; they move me, and I still know a lot of them off by heart, but it’s all changing now. I went to a funeral at Westminster Abbey a little while ago and there wasn’t one hymn that I recognised. They’ve moved on.

Did he regard himself as an actor as well as a playwright? “Not really, I can’t bear to watch myself. I can never really lose myself as actors should.”

But he did love working with directors at the National Theatre: “For me, the National Theatre has always been a friendly place, and I’m always happy to go back there. It’s not like work, you know. They’re so nice to me.”

Did he go to his own first nights?

“Sometimes, it all depends. I didn’t go to the last one, The Habit of Art, and I didn’t go to The Madness of George III. I just walked about outside. You’re such a bag of nerves that you don’t feel that you can do any good in the theatre on the night.”

And was he still working very hard? “Yes, I just wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t. I’m a bit easier on me than I used to be – I don’t usually start before about half past ten.

“I do work every day, not always writing, sometimes doing things like thinking about plots. And when you spend the day struggling with a plot you don’t feel tired, but weary. The best days are when you’ve had a good day’s writing and you feel tired.

“My plays seem to take me three years to write. I don’t know why they take so long, but I do write every day.”