The Clothes They Stood Up In review – Alan Bennett tale dressed to impress
Between the stage and TV plays and journals that are his core work, Alan Bennett has published six short stories and novellas, generally featuring a dull life convulsed by a late erotic awakening, through the agency of a stranger such as a shopkeeper, lodger or librarian.
Nottingham Playhouse has added to Bennett’s theatrical canon by adapting this 1996 tale in which Rosemary and Maurice Ransome, a pompous solicitor and his gaslighted wife, come home to find their mansion flat stripped of everything including carpets and an oven slow-cooking a casserole. Through Mr Anwar’s copious emporium, Mrs Ransome replaces her household effects but also feels her internal furniture shifting.
Bennett has previously moved his own works between media but has started out-sourcing his stories: Heidi Thomas scripted the film from his 2018 stage play Allelujah!, that premiered this week at the Toronto festival, and Adrian Scarborough, who also plays Mr Ransome, has deftly put flesh inside The Clothes They Stood Up In.
The 81 pages of prose are fairly dialogue-light for Bennett, but Scarborough (could a Bennett adapter have a more geographically apt surname?) conjures other gags from reported speech and adds convincingly soundalike new dialogue, though moving the story forward a quarter of a century can create linguistic collisions: “chaps and chapesses” sounds odd in the mouth of a Gen Z worker.
The story demands two big visual reveals – that the furniture has gone and then where it has turned up – for which Robert Jones’s set design wins deserved gasps for providing three separate living rooms, a shop, opera house, bus, business park and hospital ward.
Scarborough and actor Charlie De Melo reduce the risk of stereotype by giving Mr Anwar more back-story and specificity and, in the adapter’s biggest additions, Natasha Magigi excels as Dusty, a police trauma counsellor whose methods hilariously combine mindfulness and Pilates. As Mr Ransome, Scarborough gives a farce masterclass of pomposity and propriety slowly imploding, but the fine comic actor Sophie Thompson curiously plays Rosemary as an entitled megaphone, an acting choice exacerbated by a bouncy acoustic. Theatregoers turning their hearing aids down was a sight new to me.
But, if director Adam Penford can make the show as generally appealing to the ear as it is to the eye and funny bone, there should be a big audience for this Bennett extension.
At Nottingham Playhouse, until 1 October.
