Theatre: Lady and a tramp

THE LADY IN THE VAN

QUEEN'S THEATRE

LONDON

REMEMBER THE two Ronnies. Now meet the two Alans. In The Lady in the Van, Alan Bennett's hilarious and autobiographical new play, the dramatist's divided feelings about everything are symbolised by having him impersonated by two actors simultaneously in a sort of Morecambe and Morecambe routine.

Alan I (Kevin McNally) is the detached, observant professional writer exploiting his life and the people in it for material; Alan II is the writhing liberal who has got to do the shitty business of living. But it would take a battalion of Bennetts to get the better of the title character, Miss Shepherd, the homeless old tramp who lived in a van in the playwright's front driveway for 15 years. This combative, ungrateful, car-mad religious maniac is played here with quite brilliant formidability and pathos by Dame Maggie Smith.

Making the Trojan women look like the Beverley Sisters, she resembles, in her ragged filthy plumage and cap, the regal refugee from some mythic disaster, with a strong dash of canny Mitford eccentric thrown in. She gives you, too, wonderful glimpses of a panic-stricken woman; for, though Miss S was dogmatically entrenched in that very immobile mobile home, she was forever on the run from a troubled past. There's a quiet heartbreaking scene where this ex-novice nun reveals how her girlhood gift for the piano was strangled by the clergy. They told her that from self-sacrificial abstention "spiritual gifts would accrue" and in the desolate, gradually fraying conviction with which Smith intones the line "And they did, they did, they did", you can hear a ghostly echo of Hamlet's "except my life, except my life, except my life".

Like the woman in the old Weetabix advert who used to sing of the two men in her life, the two Alans in this play have to juggle the two old ladies in theirs. To his guilt at being an autobiographical writer is added the guilt of having an unlettered, hygiene-mad mother in an old people's home while having the incontinent Miss Shepherd right outside his window. Some of this alter ego stuff feels at once over-egged and undercooked. It squeezes dry the Grapes of Philip Roth, a writer with whom Bennett has a number of creative affinities. But, it was all redeemed in the elatingly funny, self-reflexive camp of the final scene.

I was never reconciled, though, to the bright pop-up book feel of Nicholas Hytner's production which makes Bennett's writer-infested neck of north London look more like Trumpton than what it is - Ramsay Street with added literacy.

Booking to 26 Feb (0171-494 5040). A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper