REVIEW: Enjoy by Alan Bennett, Theatre Royal, Bath

3:14pm Thursday 21st August 2008

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The final play in this year's Peter Hall season is far from typical Alan Bennett.

It was not an enormous success when it was first performed in 1980, possibly because it did not meet the audience's expectations of what a Bennett play should be.

There are echoes of Pinter and Orton in the surreal atmosphere and mildly threatening edginess.

The setting is Bennett's home territory, back-to-back homes in Leeds; in fact the last back-to-backs in an area which is daily diminishing under the progress of the bulldozers.

Alison Steadman and David Troughton are Mam and Dad (Connie and Wilf Craven). Mam clings to the past.

Dad, who's done nothing for years since being the victim of a hit and run accident, can't wait to get into their new maisonette. Everything will be different, better, and he'll start to socialise, become part of the community.

Mam can't remember anything for five minutes - her mother was the same, she constantly tells us. Ms Steadman delivers a wonderfully doolally performance.

Troughton subtly peels back the layers of Dad's character, from his obsessive attachment to his daughter, his disowning of his son who is clearly gay, to the dirty books a local ASBO candidate brings round for him.

As part of the last street standing, Mam, Dad, Sid the yob (Peter McGovern) and Mrs Clegg (Carol Macready) are monitored by silent observers from the council.

The observers in identical grey suits say nothing and just watch and listen, making the occasional note.

The idea is to observe their normal behaviour for a heritage centre preserving the character of the old slums - to include it turns out, some of the last residents. Buildings and people are to be moved to a parkland site, lock stock and barrel.

Bennett was ahead of his time in predicting the sanitisation of the grubbier parts of our social history as heritage.' The plot is full of twists and turns and unexpected revelations, and a lot of black humour.