Ordinary, humdrum life turns into plays

Press, 10 August 1985, Page 17

Ordinary, humdrum life turns into plays

This evening’s Saturday Playhouse, “One Fine Day,” is another from the pen of the English playwright, Alan Bennett, who takes the humdrum, even boring, idiosyncracies of English life and captures them under a magnifying glass. Usually his characters are Northerners, and Bennett turns their preoccupations into plays. Bennett’s “A Woman Of No Importance,” which screened in New Zealand last year, was about the archetypal senior spinster secretary, the office bore you would cross the tearoom to avoid. Bennett’s talent is that he holds his audience spellbound through her 47 minute monologue. His “Say Something Happened” also screened on television last year, with Julie Walters playing the novice social worker who tries to convince a sceptical elderly couple that they are in need of supportive care. He peoples his plays with the aged, the dying and the lonely — a grim world if it were not for Bennett’s keen observation of humour which is probably the result of seeing something of himself in the characters he creates. “One Fine Day” is the story of a middle-aged real estate agent who escapes from the interruptions and noise of his teen-age children to an empty warehouse. Here he indulges in his great pleasure — listening to operatic music. It screens on Two at 8.30 p.m.