THE UNCOMMON READER
By Alan Bennett
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 128 pages, $15
To read is to be slightly ill. And the symptoms only worsen when reading something good. A 19th-century novel, a Bleak House or an Anna Karenina, commits us to its pages with a consumptive fatigue. Moral vitaminists assure us Read More
Alan Bennett’s The History Boys is all the good things you’ve surely heard about it. I’ve seen Nicholas Hytner’s acclaimed National Theatre production twice now and doubled my pleasure. Mr. Bennett has written a wonderfully engaging play about an English obsession—schooldays. It sparkles with wit and intelligence, and it couldn’t be better acted. And I’m Read More
Alan Bennett’s The History Boys is all the good things you’ve surely heard about it. I’ve seen Nicholas Hytner’s acclaimed National Theatre production twice now and doubled my pleasure. Mr. Bennett has written a wonderfully engaging play about an English obsession—schooldays. It sparkles with wit and intelligence, and it couldn’t be better acted. And I’m Read More
The hit play of the London season is Alan Bennett’s hilarious and touching The History Boys , brilliantly directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre, and I can only hope all the exciting talk about its transfer to Broadway comes true. Put simply, Mr. Bennett has written a wonderful play about England. Put less Read More
I don’t know of a funnier Englishman than Alan Bennett, or one who’s quite so quirkily, appealingly odd . He has us convulsed with laughter about peculiar things (and peculiar people). To see his very appealing Talking Heads at the Minetta Lane is to enter a world where disappointment is oxygen and small, eccentric lurches Read More
