Review: The Lady in the Van ****

It’s only a mistake to revisit something if you are stuck in your ways, immutable in your opinions, which, as everyone knows, theatre critics categorically aren’t.

So, depite having seen and reviewed this play in Hull, at the theatre from which the production originated, I was tempted back to see it when it arrived in Bradford.

On first viewing I had been entirely unconvinced by the central performance of Nichola McAuliffe, who appeared to play the lady of the title as more caricature than character.

How changed a performance this is. The moment I realised just how changed was when McAuliffe finally unravelled the story of Miss Shepherd to a pin-drop quiet audience in Bradford – and you have to work very hard to get that kind of silence from an Alhambra audience.

Alan Bennett was the real reason I was back, his words just too good to miss. Bennett penned this play when a gift of a character landed on his street one day in the shape (and smell) of Miss Shepherd, a woman who appeared to live in the clapped out van that chugged into his life when she parked up in his garden and stayed there for 15 years.

Bennett tells the story of Miss Shepherd, but reveals as much about himself. Indeed he puts himself on stage in the shape of two characters – the internal and the external Alan. The device allows the writer to show us his Yin and Yan – the gentle, timid soul the outside world sees and the acerbic writer (Bennett has always maintained that writers are all at heart nasty pieces of work).

In Bradford – not the case when I saw the production at Hull – the two Bennetts take centre stage and we see Miss Shepherd through his eyes rather than him through hers (the focus previously).

Director Sarah Esdaile appears to have tightened the production and this judicious editing has worked wonders. It means Miss Shepherd is a welcome distraction, and not just a distraction, as she was previously. This time round it simply works. Opinion revised.

To July 16.