The Lady In The Van

The elderly Miss Shepard was a determined and rather belligerent force to be reckoned with and although the residents of the street bitterly resented the presence of her and the unsightly dilapidated van, they were far to British to come out and complain directly to her. In fact she relied on the fact that she intimidated them and consequently took advantage of any slight kindness they felt obliged to proffer, without even a hint of gratitude. None more so than that of playwright Alan Bennett who had just moved in to the Street, and when the sudden arrival of street parking restrictions were imposed in the area it was he who came to her rescue when he somewhat reluctantly offered to allow Miss Shepard to move the van into his driveway instead. He intended it be to for just a few weeks, however she ended up staying 13 years, and only eventually left when the undertaker came to collect her body.

As the opening credits of this wonderfully warm new comedy remind us, this is in fact a mostly true story. There was a real Miss Shepard (although it turned out that wasn’t her real name) and she did indeed camp out in the driveway of Alan Bennett’s nice North London home. She was such a colorful and somewhat difficult character she was too good a subject for him not to write about. At first Bennett made this eccentric woman’s life into a play for the radio, which he converted into a hit stage play in London’s West End before ending up now as a movie.

There is talk that the mysterious Miss Shepard in real life wasn’t always quite as amusing and funny as Bennett makes her appear in the movie. He has imbued her role with a great deal of his own dry sardonic wit and has written her some gloriously hysterical one-liners that has the audience in stitches. The back story of her history of how she ended up living in the van unfolds slowly in the movie and is based on fact and heresay and probably more than a small part by the writer’s imagination.

In the movie Bennett is portrayed as two parts of a split personality (both excellently played by actor Alex Jennings) : one is Bennett who is living though the experience and seemingly little else other than the rare visit of the occasional hunky man later at night, and ‘other’ Bennett is the observer and writer who sees the potential of Miss Shepard as good copy. The ‘two’ Bennetts argue with each other until there is eventually a real live-in boyfriend/partner who insists that he has simply got all this talking to himself.

In every incarnation of Miss Shepard from the radio play onwards she has been played dead straight by a poker faced (Dame) Maggie Smith in a role that she was destined to play. In reality she is simply a carrying on with even more of the same attitude and disdain as if a grander version of Dowager Countess of Grantham was now a homeless bag lady. This sheer joy of her spectacular tour-de-force performance is every inch worthy of an Oscar that it shamefully did not even get nominated for.

The movie reunites Bennett with (Sir) Nicholas Hytner who has directed all of Miss Shepard’s outings to date as well as both of Bennett’s other plays that were adapted into movies. In fact sharp eyed audience members will spot that almost the entire cast of “The History Boys” from James Corden to Dominic Cooper etc have cameo roles in “The Lady In The Van” …. with the notable exception of the late Richard Griffiths. Shot in the actual house in London’s Grosvenor Crescent where Bennett and Miss Shepard lived cheek by jowl, we are actually rewarded with a cameo of the writer himself as he comes to witness the last few scenes of the movie being shot.

It’s a wonderful quintessentially English movie that tells it as it is, and doesn’t try to pretend that being homeless is anything but rough even if you are an educated woman, and even if the rest of us as guilt-ridden liberals would want to pretend otherwise.