Maggie Smith gets the chance to play someone grander than the Dowager Countess of Grantham, although with the same piercing stare of disapproval, pinched lips and bird-like head movements, as she assesses the unsatisfactory nature of everything around her.
She plays Miss Shepherd, the “Lady in the Van”, in this very enjoyable film directed by Nicholas Hytner and adapted by Alan Bennett from his London Review of Books memoir about the haughty, cantankerous homeless woman who bullied him into having her chaotic camper van in his driveway for 15 years.
Smith’s performance, honed from the previous stage and radio versions, is terrifically good. Her Miss Shepherd never says thank you or allows any charitable deed to go unpunished; Smith shows how this once educated, talented woman is brazening out her agonised private guilt, and her presence is accompanied by much hand-wringing and suppressed distaste among the upscale north London neighbours, not unlike those in Bennett’s 60s cartoon series The Stringalongs.
Alex Jennings gives a sharp and sympathetic performance as Bennett, arguing with himself in split-screen, like a one-man married couple. Jennings shows that Bennett’s reasons for allowing Miss Shepherd to walk all over him were not down to timidity, or English reticence, or Christian charity, or because she was a guilty mother-substitute – he dismisses this glib parallel – or even because he intended from the outset to use her as material.
This final possibility is also dismissed, not altogether convincingly. Miss Shepherd was an alibi, his unacknowledged excuse for not having anyone in his life and for what he suspects is his own emotional stagnancy.
The lady in the van might have been a kind of muse: the driving force behind his dramatic work, with its brilliant insights into loneliness and age. With Bennett, Miss Shepherd performed a strange, poignant duet of prickly unhappiness and wry humour.
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