Four stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for a fleeting unsettling image
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.19.16
Some plays make awkward films,
the very nature of their enclosed stage universe rendered claustrophobic on the
big screen.
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| When Alan (Alex Jennings) cautiously worries about his new "permanent interloper's" ability to drive — let alone whether she even possesses a license — the feisty Miss Shepherd (Maggie Smith) shrugs him off with one of her imperious displays of dignified entitlement. |
That absolutely isn’t the case
with The Lady in the Van, which opens up quite cleverly under the guidance of
director Nicholas Hytner and scripter Alan Bennett. The latter has adapted this
charming little drama from his own play, which debuted in 1999 in London’s West
End, and which in turn was based on actual events recorded in his exhaustive
memoirs.
Maggie Smith starred in the stage
production, and also played the same role in a BBC Radio adaptation. No
surprise, then, that she delivers a crisp, saucy and richly memorable
performance in this cinematic version.
She plays Mary Shepherd, an
elderly homeless woman who lives in a dilapidated van that she has trundled
about a bucolic North London street called Gloucester Crescent, a neighborhood
which — in this late 1960s setting — hosts various British stage and literary
luminaries. As introduced in Hytner’s film, we get the vague sense that “Miss
Shepherd” has made a habit of parking in front of a given house until her
sloppy ways prove too distressing, at which point she fires up the van and
moves elsewhere along the lane.
Her eccentric behavior comes to
the attention of playwright, screenwriter, actor and author Alan Bennett (Alex
Jennings) when he moves into the neighborhood, taking the house at No. 23.
She’s rather hard to miss — given the combination of street rubbish and feisty
imprecations that trail in her wake — and Bennett’s new neighbors are only too
happy to supply details and rumors.
They’ve all kinda/sorta tolerated
Miss Shepherd, out of a sense of liberal guilt that prompts them into
occasional deliveries of food, reading material and any other small items they
assume she might find useful. Parents cluck when their children, passing too
close to Miss Shepherd, wrinkle their noses and complain that “she smells bad.”
Here, too, Bennett’s descriptive
prose paints marvelous word pictures, when (for example) his running commentary
describes her aromatic miasma as an “odoriferous concerto ... with urine only a
minor component.”
