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 that the habit of contemplative isolation, with its accompanying lowering of vital signs, is somehow salutary, that to read is to be a little more alive. But let’s be honest: To read is to be a lot more dead. (In the best sense of the word, of course.)

The delights of Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader begin with its title, a gentle but deft play on words, and flow forth in easeful perfection for the 120 pages that follow. (The infallible Mr. Bennett is the Brit responsible for such wonderful imports as Beyond the Fringe, Talking Heads and The History Boys.)

The uncommon reader is the queen of England, who, upon following a pair of braying royal corgis outdoors, discovers a large van, the “City of Westminster travelling library,” parked in a courtyard. Here she meets young Mr. Seakins, a ginger-haired kitchen worker and avid bookworm, whose odd deportment—he appears nearly unconscious of her regal station—intrigues the Queen.

Acting on Seakins’ recommendations, she slowly works her way up, from Compton-Burnett to Thackeray, Dickens and Eliot, and finally to the mountaintop, to Proust, having become an unlikely but passionate and discriminating consumer of literature along the way. What the woman now relishes (questing introspection, banter about Genet), the office cannot tolerate: Her aids notice her becoming as listless in her public duty as she is painfully earnest in her private discourse, and conspire to scotch off the habit before it precipitates a crisis.

This modest but sturdy novella is a spoof of two ridiculous holdovers: the British monarchy and high literary values. The first Mr. Bennett deflates, without urgency; the second he defends, without urgency. True wit relaxes, the author argues implicitly; it never overexcites. When the Queen engages the prime minister with her new learning, Mr. Bennett murmurs, “This was not a good idea. The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.”

When her security detail blows up, as a precautionary measure, the novel she’s been reading, Her Majesty responds, “Exploded? But it was Anita Brookner.” And my personal favorite, no less amusing for being inevitable: “[T]here were many who hoped for a similar meeting of the minds by saying they were reading Harry Potter, but to this the Queen (who had no time for fantasy) invariably said briskly, ‘Yes, one is saving that for a rainy day,’ and passed swiftly on.’”

Reading undoes the Queen where she most lives, so to speak; it mucks with her sense of hierarchy, of social station. “The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not.” Well, yes, exactly right. On the one hand, the great books abide in a state of more-or-less permanence, granite outcrops left exposed by a glacial recession, un-reckonable by fashion or whim; on the other hand, they are modesty in its rawest form, a record of serial failure in the face of loss and death.

Books, the really good ones, the ones that, no matter how hard we try to desecrate them with pomp or inattention, won’t go away, remind us of what it’s like to be alive. (The unpardonable cheek.) So, though apparently small in obvious scale, The Uncommon Reader is quite lovely in ambition: a little cameo that, if you look closely, is about a very public woman waking up, late in life, to the fact that she has seen everything but the world.

Stephen Metcalf is Slate magazine’s critic at large.

At least my bias should convince you of the play’s authenticity. Mr. Bennett’s autobiographical drama is about a group of adolescent schoolboys in a North of England state school who are specially tutored to get into Oxford or Cambridge, and it coincides exactly with the experience of my own schooldays growing up in Manchester, England.

I was taught by a version of Mr. Bennett’s adored teacher, Hector—played by the magnificent Richard Griffiths—who believes in education for its own glorious sake. And I was also taught by a pushy type like his young opportunist Irwin (the excellent Stephen Campbell Moore), who knows how to spin the truth like a glib politician and impress all with his flippant, effortless superiority to beat the class system.

We even had a master who “fiddled” harmlessly with us—as poor old Hector fondles the balls of the boys who ride on the back of his motorbike. The gesture, however, is quite normal in English schools—“more appreciative than investigatory,” as Mr. Bennett delicately puts it. So not to worry. Nobody else did.

Along with six or seven others, I was—to quote the poet Frances Cornford from the play—“Magnificently unprepared / For the long littleness of life.” I was specially tutored in history, as the smart-ass class in The History Boys are. Mr. Bennett wittily adapts one of the oldest jokes in England about it:

“How do I define history?” muses one of the classmates when asked for a definition. “It’s just one fucking thing after another …. ”

When you see The History Boys, imagine the fire these lower-middle-class lads with the wrong accents and the wrong backgrounds are being put to. My Oxford entrance exam, like Mr. Bennett’s, consisted of a major paper in history, plus further exams in English literature, Latin and French, and a two-hour general essay. You opened an envelope with your heart in your mouth to find three subjects listed. “Choose one essay topic only. Do not write on both sides of the paper.” Then, if you were lucky, you were “passed along” and asked to an interview.

This is the extraordinary coincidence: In my first week at Oxford, I saw Alan Bennett, then a professor of medieval history with a First Class degree (the equivalent of cum laude), strolling down the High Street looking very much as he does today, like an owlish student or a vicar (as an actor, he has actually played more vicars than vicars). I even wrote home about seeing him that first week, for this son of a Leeds butcher who would become a national treasure was already famous. Though he went on to teach at Oxford for a while, he was already the toast of Broadway in the early 1960’s with England’s first modern satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe.

Mr. Bennett’s breakthrough as a playwright, Forty Years On, was also set in a school, though it was a posh one, like Eton. (The dotty headmaster was played by Sir John Gielgud, and one of the child actors was Keith McNally, who became New York’s most successful restaurateur). The History Boys continues England’s fascination with schooldays—from the sentimental Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Terence Rattigan’s portrait of cringing, schoolmasterly failure, The Browning Version, to the popular novels the British were all raised on, like Tom Brown’s Schooldays and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

But Mr. Bennett’s achievement with his new play is to make its theme about two rival teachers and educational systems a metaphor for England. Set in the Thatcherite 1980’s, the choices the boys face mirror the state of once-proud Britain itself—real knowledge and values versus cynical success, truth and fun versus humorless, ambitious, pragmatic achievement. The History Boys is about memory and its perversion, and it’s about what it takes to beat the system and win.

“Paradox works well and mists up the windows,” Irwin, the confident phony, advises. Paradox, like foggy British understatement and a superior sense of irony, goes a long way in English circles. It makes you seem clever.

Thus Irwin can announce smoothly, “The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom …. ” Small wonder the handsome, superficial opportunist becomes the successful media pundit and government advisor while his rumpled, idealistic rival Hector is left drowning, though possibly waving.

The History Boys is both an engaging morality tale and part social satire that, in one hilarious scene performed in Churchillian French, becomes purest farce. Mr. Bennett has written a memorable farce or two—among them one about the search for the truth about Kafka, unusually entitled Kafka’s Dick. The new play has a more ambitious canvas than his recent entertaining portraits in damp defeat and embarrassing suburban aloneness, Talking Heads. It’s by far his best play since his tragedy of English history, The Madness of George III.

There’s no fury and resentment in Mr. Bennett, however. He’s more slyly acerbic, and his tone is often one of droll affection. He sides sympathetically with Hector’s world of certain old musty English values, like taking pleasure in the enduring greatness of such poets as Housman, Auden, Larkin and Stevie Smith, or taking time to enjoy the lilting melodies of the music-hall songs that your parents sang and their parents before them—or mimicking the clipped, faux sophistication of Noël Coward’s ludicrously upper-class Brief Encounter, the delights of Cole Porter’s soigné “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and the melodramatic camp of the last cigarette scene in Now, Voyager.

They’re all part of a good liberal education! Hector’s message is that there’s a lesson even in a vintage movie. “Now, Voyager—sail thou forth to seek and find.” Anyone? Walt Whitman, of course. Class, as it were, dismissed!

Teachers like Alan Bennett’s unworldly, hugely enjoyable Hector are essential to us, and they’re becoming as obsolete as stone drinking fountains. The play pays touching tribute to those unsung heroes of our youth who were humane teachers like him. Hector is someone who only hits the students he likes. He is the one who taught us the apparently irrelevant things we never forgot. Lonely, half-wasted, unreconciled Hector is privately and sorrowfully the epitome of “un”: “Un-kissed. Un-rejoicing. Un-confessed. Un-embraced.” But, as played by Richard Griffiths, he is un-equaled.

The production is blessed with two of the finest character actors in England. The genius of Mr. Griffith, who’s quite a presence, resides in his stillness. If theater is eavesdropping on strangers, Mr. Griffith compels us to listen to him with quiet, magical ease and authority. We even find ourselves sitting and listening intently to Hector as he discusses the beauty of a Thomas Hardy poem—of all surprising things. And we enjoy it!

Frances de la Tour—second only to Maggie Smith in her perfect comic timing and dry humor—is the other gift of the production as its only female. Playing the capable, sometimes explicitly frank teacher, Mrs. Lintott, Ms. de la Tour—who’s renowned in England—is the kind of brilliant character actress who can make a small cameo role memorable. She has comparatively little to play with here, yet she makes her indelible mark. To hear her Mrs. Lintott announce to us all halfway through the play, “I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice,” is an education in itself.

The boys—all eight of them—are a first-rate ensemble and exactly, rudely right. This is how it was, I thought to myself. This is how we were! You might even find yourself rooting for these adolescent know-alls with their whirling hormones and doubt. They don’t seem like Oxford material, though the sexually confused Posner (a very appealing performance from Samuel Barnett) is based by Alan Bennett on his anxious 16-year-old self.

The History Boys is, finally, an affecting memory play. It’s the outcome of those days when the future playwright didn’t know where he was—or where he was going, except perhaps to Oxford—and it’s a delight.

At least my bias should convince you of the play’s authenticity. Mr. Bennett’s autobiographical drama is about a group of adolescent schoolboys in a North of England state school who are specially tutored to get into Oxford or Cambridge, and it coincides exactly with the experience of my own schooldays growing up in Manchester, England.

I was taught by a version of Mr. Bennett’s adored teacher, Hector—played by the magnificent Richard Griffiths—who believes in education for its own glorious sake. And I was also taught by a pushy type like his young opportunist Irwin (the excellent Stephen Campbell Moore), who knows how to spin the truth like a glib politician and impress all with his flippant, effortless superiority to beat the class system.

We even had a master who “fiddled” harmlessly with us—as poor old Hector fondles the balls of the boys who ride on the back of his motorbike. The gesture, however, is quite normal in English schools—“more appreciative than investigatory,” as Mr. Bennett delicately puts it. So not to worry. Nobody else did.

Along with six or seven others, I was—to quote the poet Frances Cornford from the play—“Magnificently unprepared / For the long littleness of life.” I was specially tutored in history, as the smart-ass class in The History Boys are. Mr. Bennett wittily adapts one of the oldest jokes in England about it:

“How do I define history?” muses one of the classmates when asked for a definition. “It’s just one fucking thing after another …. ”

When you see The History Boys, imagine the fire these lower-middle-class lads with the wrong accents and the wrong backgrounds are being put to. My Oxford entrance exam, like Mr. Bennett’s, consisted of a major paper in history, plus further exams in English literature, Latin and French, and a two-hour general essay. You opened an envelope with your heart in your mouth to find three subjects listed. “Choose one essay topic only. Do not write on both sides of the paper.” Then, if you were lucky, you were “passed along” and asked to an interview.

This is the extraordinary coincidence: In my first week at Oxford, I saw Alan Bennett, then a professor of medieval history with a First Class degree (the equivalent of cum laude), strolling down the High Street looking very much as he does today, like an owlish student or a vicar (as an actor, he has actually played more vicars than vicars). I even wrote home about seeing him that first week, for this son of a Leeds butcher who would become a national treasure was already famous. Though he went on to teach at Oxford for a while, he was already the toast of Broadway in the early 1960’s with England’s first modern satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe.

Mr. Bennett’s breakthrough as a playwright, Forty Years On, was also set in a school, though it was a posh one, like Eton. (The dotty headmaster was played by Sir John Gielgud, and one of the child actors was Keith McNally, who became New York’s most successful restaurateur). The History Boys continues England’s fascination with schooldays—from the sentimental Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Terence Rattigan’s portrait of cringing, schoolmasterly failure, The Browning Version, to the popular novels the British were all raised on, like Tom Brown’s Schooldays and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

But Mr. Bennett’s achievement with his new play is to make its theme about two rival teachers and educational systems a metaphor for England. Set in the Thatcherite 1980’s, the choices the boys face mirror the state of once-proud Britain itself—real knowledge and values versus cynical success, truth and fun versus humorless, ambitious, pragmatic achievement. The History Boys is about memory and its perversion, and it’s about what it takes to beat the system and win.

“Paradox works well and mists up the windows,” Irwin, the confident phony, advises. Paradox, like foggy British understatement and a superior sense of irony, goes a long way in English circles. It makes you seem clever.

Thus Irwin can announce smoothly, “The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom …. ” Small wonder the handsome, superficial opportunist becomes the successful media pundit and government advisor while his rumpled, idealistic rival Hector is left drowning, though possibly waving.

The History Boys is both an engaging morality tale and part social satire that, in one hilarious scene performed in Churchillian French, becomes purest farce. Mr. Bennett has written a memorable farce or two—among them one about the search for the truth about Kafka, unusually entitled Kafka’s Dick. The new play has a more ambitious canvas than his recent entertaining portraits in damp defeat and embarrassing suburban aloneness, Talking Heads. It’s by far his best play since his tragedy of English history, The Madness of George III.

There’s no fury and resentment in Mr. Bennett, however. He’s more slyly acerbic, and his tone is often one of droll affection. He sides sympathetically with Hector’s world of certain old musty English values, like taking pleasure in the enduring greatness of such poets as Housman, Auden, Larkin and Stevie Smith, or taking time to enjoy the lilting melodies of the music-hall songs that your parents sang and their parents before them—or mimicking the clipped, faux sophistication of Noël Coward’s ludicrously upper-class Brief Encounter, the delights of Cole Porter’s soigné “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and the melodramatic camp of the last cigarette scene in Now, Voyager.

They’re all part of a good liberal education! Hector’s message is that there’s a lesson even in a vintage movie. “Now, Voyager—sail thou forth to seek and find.” Anyone? Walt Whitman, of course. Class, as it were, dismissed!

Teachers like Alan Bennett’s unworldly, hugely enjoyable Hector are essential to us, and they’re becoming as obsolete as stone drinking fountains. The play pays touching tribute to those unsung heroes of our youth who were humane teachers like him. Hector is someone who only hits the students he likes. He is the one who taught us the apparently irrelevant things we never forgot. Lonely, half-wasted, unreconciled Hector is privately and sorrowfully the epitome of “un”: “Un-kissed. Un-rejoicing. Un-confessed. Un-embraced.” But, as played by Richard Griffiths, he is un-equaled.

The production is blessed with two of the finest character actors in England. The genius of Mr. Griffith, who’s quite a presence, resides in his stillness. If theater is eavesdropping on strangers, Mr. Griffith compels us to listen to him with quiet, magical ease and authority. We even find ourselves sitting and listening intently to Hector as he discusses the beauty of a Thomas Hardy poem—of all surprising things. And we enjoy it!

Frances de la Tour—second only to Maggie Smith in her perfect comic timing and dry humor—is the other gift of the production as its only female. Playing the capable, sometimes explicitly frank teacher, Mrs. Lintott, Ms. de la Tour—who’s renowned in England—is the kind of brilliant character actress who can make a small cameo role memorable. She has comparatively little to play with here, yet she makes her indelible mark. To hear her Mrs. Lintott announce to us all halfway through the play, “I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice,” is an education in itself.

The boys—all eight of them—are a first-rate ensemble and exactly, rudely right. This is how it was, I thought to myself. This is how we were! You might even find yourself rooting for these adolescent know-alls with their whirling hormones and doubt. They don’t seem like Oxford material, though the sexually confused Posner (a very appealing performance from Samuel Barnett) is based by Alan Bennett on his anxious 16-year-old self.

The History Boys is, finally, an affecting memory play. It’s the outcome of those days when the future playwright didn’t know where he was—or where he was going, except perhaps to Oxford—and it’s a delight.

In a confessional program note, the playwright admits to cheating in two of the most important examinations of his life-to get his scholarship to Oxford and his coveted First Class Honors Degree in history. The issues involved inspired The History Boys . But when the somewhat eccentric Mr. Bennett says he cheated, keep in mind that he once genuinely considered becoming a vicar for no better reason than he looked like one.

Far from needing to cheat at anything, he could easily have become an Oxford don or a history professor. His rationalism put an end to his career in the clergy. His scholarly self-deprecation was theater's gain. But his notion of cheating in exams would scarcely be shared by anyone else-least of all when getting into a decent college today is achieved at any price and 3-year-olds of my acquaintance are tutored to get into play school.

The young Mr. Bennett "cheated" by reducing everything he knew to a set of show-off notes and eye-catching quotations that could be adapted to answer more or less any basic question and impress the usually bored examiners at Oxford. He knew how to shine it on, thereby appearing well-educated and clever under false pretenses. In other polished words, he was "spinning" his education as much as any smiling politician spins the news.

The History Boys is set in a working-class state school in the North of England during the 1980's (which coincides with Mr. Bennett's schooling in Leeds during the 1950's). There, the goal of a group of specially tutored 16- and 17-year-olds is to get into Oxford or Cambridge. The play is part social satire, part morality tale and, in one hysterically funny scene that's spoken in Churchillian French, purest farce. (Mr. Bennett, after all, is the dramatist of a memorable farce or two, among them one about Kafka entitled Kafka's Dick ).

But the center of The History Boys revolves around the rivalry of two teachers and two opposed systems. There's the elderly Hector (perfectly played by the great Richard Griffiths), who believes in "useless" knowledge, or knowledge for its own sake-call it poetry, or old-fashioned learning that's intended to open minds.

The unworldly Hector is the kind of teacher who hits you only if he likes you. His class even has what he calls "Silly Time" (silliness is the safety valve of the British). The boys act out a movie for Hector to guess the title; bets are placed on the outcome. Paul Henreid and Bette Davis in Now Voyager are a cinch for him, of course. But even here, there's a discreet lesson: "Now Voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find" (Walt Whitman).

It's a literary play that way. Fear not! The accessible Mr. Bennett, unlike Tom Stoppard, is "un-clever." And Hector's enthusiasms are rich: Don Giovanni ; Brief Encounter (up to a point); the songs of Piaf; a particular kind of English melancholy and yearning; King Lear ; the nostalgic ghosts of music hall; the power of language; the poetry of Larkin, Hardy, Elliot, Stevie Smith, Pascal ("The heart has its reasons which reason knoweth not").

Hector's rival is the pushy young teacher Irwin (the excellent Stephen Campbell Moore), a flashy pragmatist who believes that knowledge for its own sake isn't "useful." "History nowadays is not a matter of conviction," Irwin says (with chilly conviction). He wants the smart, pimply class to be trained like slick thoroughbreds in superficiality. "Truth" is not an option. The bored Oxford examiner will awaken from his effortlessly superior slumber if, for example, he's presented with an argument that Pearl Harbor took the Japanese by surprise rather than the Americans.

Small wonder the fraudulent Irwin becomes a BBC TV "culture" pundit and government advisor. Advising members of Parliament on how to present a case for abolishing trial by jury and the presumption of innocence, he comes up with one of Mr. Bennett's lovely aphorisms: "The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom …. "

I can vouch for Mr. Bennett's premise for the play, incidentally. A generation after him, I "cheated" to get into Oxford. Like the adolescents in The History Boys , a privileged few of us were specially tutored for three months at a state school in the North of England to shine in the exam. My subject was history, with minor papers in French and Latin. Happy days! But the showoff crunch came with a general essay everyone had to write in about 90 minutes or less. You opened an envelope and had a choice to write about one of only two subjects. Can you imagine ?

I'm having a heart attack just recalling it. But when I opened the envelope, I couldn't believe my good fortune. One of the subjects read simply, "Status-discuss."

By some miracle, I'd read Vance Oakley Packard's The Status Seekers and could therefore compare vulgar American status with the charm of England's snobbery and its unfortunate class system. As the apt line in The History Boys goes, "An amused tolerance always comes over best. Paradox works well and mists up the windows." I did exactly what Mr. Bennett did in his Oxford exams (though without the guilt): I dragged in everything I sort of knew with sparkling quotations to match-including learned thoughts about the outcast status of Malvolio; the dropout status of Hamlet; the status of getting into Oxford; the necessity of A.E. Housman's English country idyll versus the urban blight; and, of course, the fury of the working-class outsider in Look Back in Anger , which I seem to have been writing about ever since.

Does The History Boys have any flaws? Does the curtain go up before every show? It's a lengthy play (but not if you enjoy it). Though it's set in the Thatcherite 1980's, its sense of period isn't specific. Mr. Bennett is clearly on old Hector's side (but aren't we all?). There's so much fun and wit here-including Mr. Bennett's portrait of hormonal adolescents and those ancient, unsung, anonymous heroes of our youth we now acknowledge as brave souls and good teachers. Why, even Hector's fumbling gropes with his indifferent students riding on the back of his motorbike are forgivably performed "more in benediction than gratification."

Mr. Hytner's cast is just perfect: all eight schoolboys, the superb Mr. Griffiths, the farcically ignorant headmaster of Clive Merrison and Frances De La Tour's dry, witty teacher, Mrs. Lintott. Ms. De La Tour is among the leading character actors in England, a nation of character actors, and she's second only in comedy to Maggie Smith. "I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice," her Mrs. Lintott confides to us more than halfway through the play. Ms. De La Tour's delivery of the line is an education in itself.

The History Boys happily continues British theater's preoccupation with schooldays. From Goodbye Mr. Chips to Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version with its wronged teacher cringing in failure, to Another Country's Etonesque breeding ground of the British spies Burgess and McLean, school has often served as a stage metaphor for the state of England, for its class system and the songs it sang "on a braver day." Hector is an English Jean Brodie in his own eccentric fashion. He's essential to us and he's obsolete-drowning, not waving.

The play also reminds us that Mr. Bennett's breakthrough Forty Years On , more than 30 years ago, was set in a private school with Sir John Gielgud playing the nutty headmaster. (A child actor named Keith McNally, who became the renowned New York restaurateur, was also in the cast.) Alan Bennett has thus come memorably full circle, and he's gone far beyond his popular, minor-key Talking Heads and written a smashing new play. Let's hope it comes to New York soon.

I'm off on a thoroughly deserved vacation. See you in the brave new season, everyone.

On the one hand, he's England's Poet Laureate of disenchantment. On the other, he seems to have invented his own Theater of Social Embarrassment. Life embarrasses him, like a blushing vicar opening a garden fête. Over the years, Mr. Bennett himself has played more vicars than vicars play vicars. He began his professional career famously playing one in Beyond the Fringe , the 1960 landmark satire with Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. In "Take a Pew," Mr. Bennett, the young, owlish Oxford graduate-who looks little different today-played a vicar wrestling with the meaning of it all in his sermon:

"You know, Life-Life, it's rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key. Some of us-some of us think we've found the key, don't we? We roll back the lid of the sardine tin of Life, we reveal the sardines, the riches of Life, therein and we get them out, we enjoy them. But, you know, there's always a little piece in the corner that you can't get out. I wonder-I wonder, is there a little piece in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine."

That could easily be one of his monologues in Talking Heads today. In that sense, his brilliant cameos have changed little-except, perhaps, in their characterization of aloneness. His sad sacks and eccentrics from the British lower-middle classes are pretenders to better things. But they are solo performances. His characters are most often alone-even when they live with other people. Particularly when they live with other people.

They gossip to us quite intimately like friendly neighbors over the garden wall. They are the kind of people, one imagines, that only Alan Bennett might know (or troubles to know). Where on earth does he find them? His memories of his own family life growing up in provincial Leeds in the North of England have stayed with him, along with his flat, uncompromised Yorkshire accent. (Where a cuppa tea is a coop -a tea). They also find him: A homeless tramp, Mary Shepherd, took up residence in the garden of his London home for 15 years until she died. He wrote a play about her for Maggie Smith, The Lady in the Van .

But why, I once asked him, did he let her stay for 15 long, clearly inconvenient years? "I don't really know," he replied, looking a bit embarrassed. "I think I must have got used to her."

He's a droll, very English playwright. But not by eccentricity alone. Forty Years On , with John Gielgud, was about that typically English preoccupation, life in a cut-rate public school. (Or, boarding school as metaphor for England.) "What is truth and what is fable?" went one of its memorable lines. "Where is Ruth and where is Mabel?"

Then again, Kafka's Dick was an intellectual farce about the nature of biography, and whether or not, in the cause of inquiring minds, we need to know the size of Kafka's dick. Or of anybody else's. Good old English bawdy never goes amiss with Mr. Bennett. Then there's his verbal wit, his pleasure in language, farting jokes or deliberately bad jokes, his flair for the scatological and English schoolboy humor. Think of all the potty jokes in his The Madness of King George .

The Talking Heads monologues were originally written for television, but for once the transfer works well. There are two separate shows, directed by Michael Engler-six monologues in all-and the evening I caught could scarcely be better. Not all the actors, it's said by American critics, have mastered the Northern accent. But as Mr. Bennett would say, "That's foony." Speaking as a proud Northern Englishman myself, the North country vowel sounds I heard were as warmly authentic as a nice coopa tea. True, Lynn Redgrave is English. But her own upbringing is far away from her perfect Yorkshire accent-as far away, we could argue, as the classless Americans in the cast.

In the curtain raiser, "Her Big Chance," the excellent Valerie Mahaffey plays a sweet porn actress named Lesley, who hopes to be taken seriously as an artist in the way that the lower-middle classes forever aspire to refinement. Lesley hasn't always done porn. She was the one on the back of the farm cart wearing a shawl in Roman Polanski's Tess . "The shawl was original nineteenth-century embroidery. All hand done."

One of her stories recalls a discussion with Terry, the assistant on the porn movie, about civilized behavior. "It's the usual story, Lesley. Art comes in at the door, manners go out of the window," Terry tells her, then asks, "Why is making a film like being a mushroom?" She asks, "Why, Terry?" "They keep you in the dark," he replies, "and every now and again somebody comes and throws a bucket of shit over you." She says, "That's interesting. Only Terry, they don't grow mushrooms like that now. It's all industrialised." "You sound like a cultured person," says Terry. "What say we spend the evening exploring the delights of Lee-on-Solent?''

"His room's nicer than mine," Lesley adds. "His bathroom's got a hair-dryer."

"A Chip in the Sugar"-ludicrous, surreal title!-is about a middle-aged man, Graham, who's still living with his widowed mother, in a relationship that's like a bad, necessary marriage, when there's what he calls "a spot of excitement." Graham's 72-year-old mother plans to marry her old flame Mr. Turnbull, a flashy gents' outfitter. They met up again when Mum fell down during an outing to the war memorial.

"'Remember you?'" Graham recalls her saying as she still lay there flat on the ground. "'Of course. It's Frank Turnbull. It must be fifty years.' He said, 'Fifty-two. Filey. 1934.' She said, 'Sea-Crest.' He said, 'No sand in the bedrooms.' And they both cracked up laughing. Meanwhile, she's still stuck on the pavement. I said, 'Come along, Mother. We don't want piles.'"

Daniel Davis rings more belly laughs out of the wan, emotionally troubled Graham than we've a right to expect from a character whose sad refrain, "I didn't say anything," is both a secret reproach and self-censored, resigned defeat.

Ms. Redgrave has the funniest monologue with her genteel tale of chiropody and fetishism, "Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet." "What is important, Miss Fozzard, is what are we going to do about your feet?" announces her chiropodist, Mr. Suddaby, who's emigrating to Scarborough. "You've been coming to me for so long I don't like to think of your feet falling into the wrong hands."

Miss Fozzard, who lives with her brother, Bernard, who's had "a cerebral accident," elevates the language with small snobberies. She hires an Australian nurse to look after Bernard. "Strong girl, very capable. And a qualified physiotherapist with a diploma in caring. It's Australian caring but I suppose it'll be the same as ours only minus the bugbear of hypothermia."

There's solace with the new chiropodist, Mr. Dunderdale, who tells Miss Fozzard between the verrucae and sweet sherry how he came to choose his profession. "'It's so I could kneel at the feet of thousands of women and my wife would never turn a hair.' I said, 'Oh. Is there a Mrs. Dunderdale?' He said, 'There was. She passed over.'"

Romance, Alan Bennett is telling us, blossoms decorously in unlikely places. "Next time, if you're very good, I shall initiate you into the mysteries of the metatarsal arch," Mr. Dunderdale confides after the first treatment. It certainly gives her something to think about on the bus.

Ms. Redgrave has a lot of fun with Miss Fozzard, and so do we. This fine actress glows anticipating what her memorable character might say next. "Have you ever had any champagne?" Mr. Dunderdale asks, wishing to toast the future. "No," Miss Fozzard replies obligingly. "But I've seen it at the conclusion of motor races."