Enjoy

If at first you don?t succeed...

When Alan Bennett's Enjoy first opened in 1980 the critics mauled it and it closed within a few weeks. Almost 30 years later it's revival has been hailed as a satirical masterpiece and is reputed to have taken £1 million in advance ticket sales. Starring Alison Steadman and David Troughton, directed by Christopher Luscombe, it has been described as "an astonishingly prescient, blackly comic modern classic".

What is Enjoy about?

Set in Armley, Leeds (Bennett's birthplace), in one of the few remaining back to back houses left in existence, we meet Connie and Wilf Craven. He a bitter curmudgeon with an iron plate in his head, forever moaning about how life has given him a raw deal, she a woman with early stages of Alzheimer's yet stoically cheerful and compelled to sing. As they wait on the arrival of the bulldozers to raze their home to the ground they notice a series of silent observers taking an interest in the comings and goings, and routines of the back to back inhabitants.

Wilf doesn't take much notice at first as he's busy dreaming of his new life in a maisonette with underfloor heating, but when a woman from the council turns up and tells them that the council are intending to demolish the house brick by brick, then rebuild it in a museum, including its inhabitants, Connie and Wilf begin to wonder if everything is as it seems, particularly when they can see that the woman from the council is quite plainly a man in drag.

Did you know?

Before Bennett became a writer and performer he taught medieval history at Exeter College, Oxford.