Talking Heads

LAST TICKETS

Three women talking non-stop with unmistakable British humour


Alan Bennett wrote these monologues for the BBC between 1988 and 1998. Reminiscent of his childhood spent in the provinces of England in the 1940s and 1950s, Bennett explains that he soon learned a valuable lesson: life is generally something that happens elsewhere.


Bennett humorously depicts a series of insignificant characters, existences without a future who, to avoid falling into the vertigo of emptiness and to create the illusion of life, talk non-stop.


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There is something about these monologues that disturbs me. It escapes me why the disturbing is often fascinating. But that's how it is. It seems to me that Bennett's lucidity enters the human soul as a laparoscope does the human body. Bennett looks at his characters as equals. Not with sorrow but with compassion. Not with judgment but with empathy. And the truth is, I like them.

The protagonists of these three monologues never tell the whole story. They only tell their point of view, possibly unjust towards the other characters they talk about. And they do so from their wisdom, from their madness, from their pain. And, above all, from their unhappiness. Because Bennett's characters are trapped. Perhaps we could say that they are a little simple or a little common or a little old fashioned, but they are essentially three people trying to explain to themselves why they have the unpleasant feeling that life has passed them by.


Lina Lambert

• Show included in the season tickets.