Alan Bennett is an English playwright. He writes for the stage, television, movies and print media. His plays have been sold out in London's West End and some have been performed on Broadway. His plays have varied by theme and form; he has written history plays, farce, monologues and autobiographical plays, as well as novellas. He has also performed as an actor on stage and television.
Alan Bennett was born in Leeds, West Yorkshire, in 1934. His father was a butcher and his mother was a homemaker. Benett graduated from Leeds Modern Boys School and later received Russian language training during his military service. He served in the Intelligence Corps from 1952-1954. Bennett then went to Oxford University where he studied history, receiving a first-class degree in modern history in 1957.
He began a career as a don in history at Magdalen College, Oxford, but in 1960 he and fellow student writers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore wrote and performed a satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe, which was commissioned by the official Edinburgh Festival. The Fringe was another festival being held in Edinburgh. Beyond the Fringe opened on August 22, 1960 at the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum, and critics called the play a watershed for English satire. The play moved to Broadway in New York in 1962. Beyond the Fringe won a London Evening Standard award in 1961 and an Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1963. Bennett gradually abandoned his academic career at Oxford (1962) and moved into a writing career.
The anarchic, irreverent humor in the routines which composed Beyond the Fringe foreshadowed many later comedy shows such as Laugh-In, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live. Bennett has written more than forty works for stage, screen, and television. Some works satirize aspects of lower middle-class daily life in England and resistance to the social changes affecting English society in the 1960s, and others are works of historical or political satire.
The Uncommon Reader, the All Fairfax Reads selection for 2008, is a novella, or short novel, which was published in the United States in September 2007. Other print works are Father, Father Burning Bright, Writing Home, The Clothes They Stood Up In (a humorous novella), The Laying on of Hands (stories) and autobiographical works Telling Tales and Untold Stories.
Bennett lives today in Camden Town, a London neighborhood. Diagnosed with cancer in 1997, he lives a quiet and somewhat reclusive life. He also has a home in Yorkshire, and one in New York.
Web Sites
- The Playwright's Database
- Screen Online
- Internet Movie Database
- "The History Boys"
- The New York Times
- Wikipedia
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