The Lady In The Van : December 2015

The Lady in the Van is an upcoming 2015 British drama film adapted by Alan Bennett from his 1999 play of the same name, which was nominated at the 2000 Olivier Awards for Play of the Year. It is directed by Nicholas Hytner, who directed the original production at the Queen’s Theatre in London. Starring Maggie Smith and Alex Jennings, it tells the true story about an elderly woman called Mary Shepherd who lived in a battered car on the driveway of the writer Alan Bennett for 15 years.

The Plot and the Story!

Maggie Smith has played Miss Shepherd twice before, in the 1999 theatrical production and in a 2009 Radio 4 adaptation.
Life imitates art in The Lady in the Van, the story of the itinerant Miss Shepherd, who lived in a van in Alan Bennett’s driveway from the early1970s until her death in 1989. It is doubtful that Bennett could have made up the eccentric Miss Shepherd if he tried, but his poignant, funny but unsentimental account of their strange relationship is akin to his best fictional screen writing.

Bennett concedes that “One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation”, but as the plastic bags build up, the years pass by and Miss Shepherd moves into Bennett’s driveway, a relationship is established which defines a certain moment in late 20th-century London life which has probably gone forever. The dissenting, liberal, middle-class world of Bennett and his peers comes into hilarious but also telling collision with the world of Miss Shepherd: “there was a gap between our social position and our social obligations. It was in this gap that Miss Shepherd (in her van) was able to live”.

Bennett recounts Miss Shepherd’s bizarre escapades in his inimitable style, from her letter to the Argentinean Embassy at the height of the Falklands War, to her attempts to stand for Parliament and wangle an electric wheelchair out of the Social Services. Beautifully observed, The Lady in the Van is as notable for Bennett’s attempts to uncover the enigmatic history of Miss Shepherd, as it is for its amusing account of her eccentric escapades.

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