It's all there: the tweed jacket, the red tie, the pullover, the mop of blond hair and, above all, that gloriously Eeyore-ish delivery, if Eeyore spoke with the flat northern vowels of a Leeds upbringing. It’s almost as if the splendid Alex Jennings is more Alan Bennett than Bennett himself, playing the writer in this double bill of autobiographical “recollections” that transfers to the West End after a sell-out run at the National Theatre.
An entire cultural spin-off industry could be created from actors portraying Bennett, who has always admitted to portraying a version of himself inside a version of his family in his writings. First up, and serving as a meagre amuse-bouche to the far heftier Cocktail Sticks, comes Hymn, about Bennett’s childhood affinity with music, both through the hymns he sang at school and because of his butcher father, who was an accomplished violinist. Both these potentially fascinating strands are left frustratingly underexplored and Jennings’s narration is too often overwhelmed by the onstage string quartet. What this piece does evoke powerfully, however, and in ways reminiscent of Ken Loach’s stirring film The Spirit of ’45, is a bygone era of municipal cultural pride.
Throughout, there is one glorious constant: that wonderful voice, captured to perfection by Jennings. For Cocktail Sticks, Jennings is joined by Gabrielle Lloyd and Jeff Rawle, as Bennett conducts a series of imaginary conversations with Mam and Dad, looking back with ruefulness at how his socially uneasy parents embarrassed him, especially when he was a student at Oxford.
It’s a richly poignant portrait of an inward-looking yet loving couple, whose social endeavours were permanently thwarted by, as Bennett mischievously describes it, an aversion to both coffee and sherry.
Nicholas Hytner’s assured production could usefully include a couple of the real-life Bennett’s disarming flashing smiles to vary the mood of light melancholy. Still, the predominant note is regret, at things left unsaid, at the ageing process, at the depression and then dementia that claimed his mother, whose dream of a cocktail party was only fulfilled at her funeral. Yet running through everything are those soothing vowel sounds, smoothing over even the roughest of emotions. In a muddly sort of way, implies Bennett, things turn out alright in the end.
Until June 15, 020 7452 3000, untoldstorieswestend.com
