: Alan Bennett
: The Wind in the Willows
: Faber& Faber
: 9780571301232
: 1
: CHF 10.00
:
: Dramatik
: English
: 128
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Believe me, my young friend, there is absolutely nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In them or out of them, it doesn't matter. Whether you get away or you don't, whether you arrive at your destination or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy.' Ever since the publication of Kenneth Grahame's novel in 1908, the characters of Ratty, Mole, Toad and Badger have delighted generations of readers. Now Alan Bennett has written an adaptation for the stage, a version which is both true to the original and yet carries that distinctive Bennett hallmark. Alan Bennett introduces this edition, writing about the history of the project and the staging of the production. 'Bennett is even able to inject the odd sly joke for the adult without bewildering the tots... the result is a delightful evening, a treat for anyone.' The Times

ALAN BENNETT has been a leading dramatist since Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His works for stage and screen include Talking Heads, Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, A Question of Attribution, The Madness of George III, an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, The History Boys, The Habit of Art, People, Hymn, Cocktail Sticks and Allelujah! His collections of prose are Writing Home, Untold Stories (PEN/Ackerley Prize, 2006) and Keeping On, Keeping On. Six Poets contains Bennett's selection of English verse, accompanied by his commentary. His fiction includes The Uncommon Reader and Smut: Two Unseemly Stories., Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, revived for the BBC during the exceptional circumstances of the 2020 lockdown, including two new monologues, published as Two Besides. His many works for the stage include Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van (together with the screenplay), A Question of Attribution, The Madness of George III (together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George), and an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. At the National Theatre, London, The History Boys (also a screenplay) won numerous awards including Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play, an Olivier for Best New Play and the South Bank Award. On Broadway, The History Boys won five New York Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics' Circle Awards, a New York Drama Critics' Award, a New York Drama League Award and six Tonys. Also at the National, The Habit of Art, People, Hymn and Cocktail Sticks. Allelujah! premiered at the Bridge Theatre, London. His collections of prose are Writing Home, Untold Stories (PEN/Ackerley Prize, 2006) and Keeping On Keeping On. Bennett's selection of English verse, accompanied by his commentary is published in Six Poets, Hardy to Larkin. His lockdown diaries, published as House Arrest, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Fiction includes The Uncommon Reader, Smut: Two Unseemly Stories and another Sunday Times bestseller, Killing Time.

Some time in 1987 Richard Eyre, newly appointed Director of the National Theatre, asked me if I’d think about writing a play that would combineTheWindintheWillows with some account of the life of its author Kenneth Grahame. I had one or two similar approaches around that time, including a proposal for a film in which Bob Hoskins was to play Rat and Michael Caine Toad. Kenneth Grahame died in 1932, so this flurry of interest could be put down to money and managements waking up to the fact that, fifty years on, here was a best-seller that was now out of copyright.

Cut to December 1990, a week before the opening of the play I eventually wrote. Passing the British Museum, I ran into Bodley’s Librarian, David Vaisey, who was taking a gloomy breather from some unending committee on the impending transfer to the new British Library. As I told him about rehearsingTheWindintheWillows, he became gloomier still. What I had not known was that Kenneth Grahame’s long love affair with Oxford had led him to bequeath the copyright in the book to the university, and a good little earner it had proved to be. Now the National Theatre’s gain was about to be the Bodleian Library’s loss.

I don’t recall readingTheWindintheWillows as a child, or indeed any of the classics of children’s literature. This was partly the library’s fault. In those days Armley Junior Library at the bottom of Wesley Road in Leeds bound all their volumes in heavy maroon or black, so thatTheAdventuresof MillyMollyMandy were every bit as forbidding asTheAnatomyofMelancholy. DoubtlessTheWindintheWillows was there somewhere, along withWinniethePooh andAlice and all the other books every well-brought-upChildren’sHour-listening child was supposed to read. Actually, I think I do remember looking atAlice and being put off by the Tenniel illustrations. ‘Too old fashioned,’ I thought, ‘looks like a classic,’ and back it went on the shelf.

It was only in the sixties, when I was rather haphazardly reading round the Edwardians with some vague idea of writing a history play, (which eventually turned intoFortyYears On), that I read Kenneth Grahame’sTheGoldenAge andDreamDays. I leftTheWindintheWillows until last because I thought I had read it already – this being virtually the definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have done so.

One consideration that had kept me away from the book for so long, gave it a protective coating every bit as off-putting as those black and maroon bindings of my childhood, was that it hadfans. Fans are a feature of a certain kind of book. It’s often a children’s book –WinniethePooh,Alice andTheHobbit are examples – or it is a grown-up children’s book such as those of Wodehouse, E. F. Benson and Conan Doyle. But Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope are nothing if not adult and they have fans too – and fan clubs – so children are not the essence of it.

What is common to all these authors, though, is the capacity to create self-contained worlds; their books constitute systems of literary self-sufficiency in ways that other novels, often more profound, do not. It is a kind of cosiness. Dickens is not cosy; he is always taking his reader back into the real world in a way that Trollope, who is cosy, does not. So it is Trollope who has the fans. In our own day the same distinction could be drawn between the novels of Evelyn Waugh and those of Anthony Powell – Powell with fans, Waugh not. And though exceptions occur to me even as I write – the Brontës? (Fans of the lives more than of the books.) Hardy? (Fans of the scenery) – I have always found fans a great deterrent: ‘It’s just your kind of thing.’ ‘Really? And how would you know?’

Back in 1988, I set to work trying to interweave Grahame’s real and fictional worlds, but I soon ran into difficulties. Grahame’s life had not been a happy one. Born in 1859, he never had (as he put it) ‘a proper equipment of parents’, and was effectively orphaned at the age of five when his mother died of scarlet fever and his drunkard father packed him off to Cookham in Berkshire to live with his grandparents; he never saw his father again. He was sent to St Edward’s School in Oxford, where he did moderately well, and was looking forward to going up to university there when the family – or the ‘grown-ups’, as he thought of them all his life – decided he should go into the City as a clerk (‘a pale-faced quilldriver’) in the Bank of England.

Disappointed though he was (and it was a disappointment that did