Bennett, Alan

Bennett, Alan (1934- ), English playwright. Born in Leeds, Bennett was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he read history. With Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore, he was one of the authors and performers of the revue Beyond the Fringe, which ran for several years during the 1960s in both London and New York. He then wrote a television series, On the Margin (1966), before the production of his first stage play, Forty Years On (1968), an allegory about the decline of Britain set in a fantastical boys' school called Albion House. Several stage plays followed, each stamped with Bennett's idiosyncratic brand of gentle, self-mocking satire, such as Getting On (1971), Habeas Corpus (1973), The Old Country (1977), and The Madness of George III (1991), on which he based his screenplay for the 1995 film, The Madness of King George.

He has also written much for television, including An Englishman Abroad (1983) about the spy Guy Burgess, later staged as a double bill (Single Spies, 1988) with A Question of Attribution, about another spy, Anthony Blunt, and Talking Heads (1988) and Talking Heads 2 (1998), two series of tragicomic monologues. Writing Home (1994), Bennett's acclaimed collection of diaries, is comic and camp, and reached the top of the bestseller list immediately on publication. At its core is “The Lady in the Van”, the story of a homeless tramp who took up temporary residence in Bennett's garden and stayed there for 15 years. A second autobiographical collection, Untold Stories, was published in 2005. His satirical novel The Laying on of Hands, about the death of a celebrity masseur, was published in 2001. A new play, The History Boys, set like his earlier Forty Years On in a boys’ school, had its world premiere at the National Theatre in 2004 and transferred to Broadway in 2006; it received Best Play accolades from both the Olivier and Tony awards.