‘So — take heart,’ said Alan Bennett, sending us out from his play, Cocktail Sticks, on a cheery note. The treatment for cancer had been gruelling, but that was 15 years ago, so…
This Radio 4 production was adapted (and produced) by Gordon House from the stage version at the National Theatre but was perfectly made for radio, a monologue interrupted by dramatic scenes that take us back into Bennett’s childhood. Why, he wonders, is there nothing from that past for him to write about — no trauma, no deprivation, no disappointment? Surely, his parents could have done more to help him become a writer?
With anyone else this would have sounded so trite and superficial, uncaring even, the typical writer turning over his own life, his own family for commercial gain. But with Bennett it becomes masterful, each fragment of memory telling us something not so much about his life as about the blanks in our own half-formed reflections. A plastic tube filled with cocktail sticks discovered in a kitchen cupboard after his mother’s death is the catalyst. After which Bennett comes to realise that perhaps nothing much happening in a life is a writer’s blessing: ‘The life you don’t have is as ample a territory as the life that you do.’
Bennett himself narrates, with Alex Jennings playing him as a child in a Leeds suburb, a bemused adolescent, at Oxford in the late Fifties, meeting the stars on Broadway, with his mother as she drifts away from life in the nursing home at Weston-super-Mare. The two voices segue seamlessly into each other so that it’s difficult to tell recreation from reflection. Bennett goes to the pictures as a boy and has an unfortunate encounter but there was nothing much to it, a leg fondled, a man trying to be friendly.
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