TALKING HEADS
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Bennett’s a TV writer himself–but not the kind to settle for cheap sneers or easy sentimentality, which is probably why he’s not very well known in America. In his collection of monologues Talking Heads, written for BBC television in the late 80s, the now-60-year-old Englishman sketches six small-town eccentrics. They speak not about their own feelings, but about other people–the folks who share or intrude upon their world. Behind the tales they tell lurk secret stories–their own. Talking Heads’ separate segments are given their shape–and these are beautifully structured one-act plays, not just confessional monologues–by the unspoken dramas played out behind the characters’ words.
Take “Bed Among the Lentils,” known to some here from the Masterpiece Theatre broadcast several years ago of the BBC production starring Maggie Smith. The speaker, Susan, is the bored wife of an Anglican minister in a small north-country town of the sort in which Bennett grew up. Sardonically she describes her husband’s “fan club”–pious old ladies whose lives are built around church activities and who dote on what Susan calls her husband’s “underneath the cassock I’m just an ordinary man” act. As Susan shares her scathingly funny observations about the people who know her as “Mrs. Vicar,” she drops unconscious hints about the real crisis that drives the story: her alcoholism. Casual comments about quick trips to the local pub and spilling milk on her dinner guests pave the way for a tart anecdote about a showdown with some parishioners over their floral arrangements for the altar, during which, Susan mentions, she somehow slipped and fell down the steps–drunk, of course, though Susan never says so. It’s a wildly funny sequence–but also a chilling one, if the actress playing it makes its subtext clear.
