Alan Bennett’s Lady in the Van tells the story of a homeless woman called Miss Shepherd who moved her van into the playwright’s drive temporarily and ended up staying there for 15 years. Speaking about the film adaptation, which stars Maggie Smith, at Hay, Bennett claimed that Miss Shepherd would not be given the same welcome by the ‘basement-digging bankers’ who currently live on Gloucester Crescent compared to those who did when she arrived back in the 1970s.
Bennett – who says that the British are best at hypocrisy – is right about people in the present day being less compassionate. Speaking about the film, the project’s director Nicholas Hytner revealed they had some unwanted guests of their own while filming on the now infamous road in Camden:
‘The film covers a 20 year time period and one of the ways we show that is the cars parked in the crescent gradually change and these cars would be taken away to some yard a couples of miles away over the weekend. But they left the van in the drive over the weekend and didn’t lock it with sufficient care, and when they came back on the Monday in a wonderful case of life imitating art a couple of old drunks from Camden Town had taken over it.’
The incident caused members of the art department to go ‘ashen-faced’ as they had to clean the van’s items before adding professional dirt to them again. ‘I said “what’s going on here,” they said “don’t tell Maggie,” they had to take away the contents of the van and de-clean it and then bring it back filthy again,’ Hytner said.
Mr S wonders if the incident had occurred in the 70s, whether the ‘drunks’ would have been invited to stay for longer.
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