Lady in the Van is pure pleasure from beginning to end. Bennett is so deft at touching deep areas in the lightest, most everyday way and language. His own undecided self that sees two sides of almost every problem, or making one self undermine the reasons given by his other self by translating good will into more obvious self-interest is brilliantly dramatised by having two characters play him. When the play first opened, if I remember Bennett himself played one his selves, but in Richmond his two persona are portrayed brilliantly by David Holt and Paul Bigley. Both look remarkably alike and like Bennett himself, an effect enhanced, perhaps even created, by their wearing identical outfits based on Bennett's pre-dilection for looking like an ageless prep schoolmaster. Uncannily however both sound like Bennett, and when David Holt opens play you can almost hear the audience gasp with the similarity between actor and part.
      Susan Hampshire plays Miss Shepherd, the eponymous hero, with terrific style. She captures brilliantly Miss Shepherd's mixture of frailty and old-world manners and understatement, as she also does her perpetual denial of the circumstances with which she has to deal. Susan Hampshire's portrayal manipulates the hapless Bennett with compelling ease and only in death, and perhaps not even then, is he released from the burden he did seek in the first place. 
      Smaller parts are just as tellingly acted. The snobby couple from over the road (Rufus/Tim Wallers and Pauline/Victoria Carling) capture with refinement just that mixture of disdain and liberal-care-so-long-as I-don't-have-to-do-anything-myself which they are supposed to represent. Clothes and manner are well judged, as they are for agenda-laden social worker (Deborah Maclaren) always making sure she's on the clients side even if it means flying in the face of any evidence to the contrary. Her denial of reality is not that far off Miss Shepherd's, which is another delightful irony running through the play. The concept of caring is partly what the play is about: the official care of the social worker which should achieve nothing, but surprisingly sometimes does, the neighbourly care of the couple opposite, and, in the end, the ambulance and the doctor.
      But at the heart of the play is Bennett's own ambivalence to his caring. We know he was reluctant to start caring for her, and that she just sort of moved in. Through the play we see the comparison with the distant care he offers his mentally ailing mother in Yorkshire and the all too present care he offers to a virtual stranger parked in his own front garden. In the end whatever he wanted to do, or whatever in private he would like to have done, he oversees Miss Shepherd's care and decline for fifteen, or was it twenty, years. This ambivalent attitude to a sort of mother-figure allows Bennett to touch candidly on some revealing parts of his own psycho-sexual nature, brought home when at Miss Shepherd's funeral he compares Joe Orton's active homosexual conquests to his own timid fantasies and inactivity. Yet ironically despite his attempts at inactivity, unlike Hamlet, he actually does act and looks after Miss Shepherd. Word or deed; which counts?
       One of Bennett's greatest gifts is his ear. This not only allows him to pick just the right but often unlikely simile or phrase from everyday life, but like a composer permits him to pace the drama perfectly. His art is to conceal his art, and few do it better; but then concealment is another of Bennett's greatest gifts, which is brilliantly suggested in the final moments of the play.
      The production is quite elaborate and includes both a Bedford van and a Robin reliant. Yet it's not the elaborate setting but telling dialogue that really strikes home. The play is less a naturalistic portrayal of real events, than an interior dialogue set in, and tirggered, by real life.
      This is a production that must be seen. It's only on for a week. Don't miss it.
Roderick Swanston