| Talking Heads | |
| Premiere: | The Chichester Festival Theatre, UK, 1991 New Version : Minetta Lane Theatre, NY, April 6, 2003 |
| Orig Lang: | English |
Talking Heads is a stage adaptation of the BBC series of the same title created by Alan Bennett. It consists of six monologues presented in alternating programmes of three each.
Various incarnations of the original BBC television series found their way to the stage, including adaptations produced for the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1991, London's West End in 1992 and 1998, St. Martin's in Lancaster in 1994 and at the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles in 2002.[1]
The original 1991-92 stage production comprised "A Woman of No Importance", "A Chip in the Sugar" and "A Lady of Letters", with Alan Bennett and Patricia Routledge reprising their TV roles.
Staged by Michael Engler, the off-Broadway production opened at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village on April 6, 2003 and ran until September 7. The opening night casts included Brenda Wehle as Celia, Christine Ebersole as Irene, Kathleen Chalfant as Susan, Valerie Mahaffey as Leslie, Daniel Davis as Graham, and Lynn Redgrave as Miss Fozzard.
In his review in The New York Times, Ben Brantley noted the play "is not an unqualified success. Presented in two programs of three monologues apiece, Talking Heads provides two perfectly pleasant evenings of civilized entertainment. But . . . it's impossible not to feel that something precious has been lost in the trans-Atlantic translation. This is largely because no one does repression – and its first cousin, denial – like the English . . . the Talking Heads monologues are quiet, exquisitely modulated and veddy, veddy English exercises in dramatic irony. Raise the speakers' voices, literally or figuratively, and you risk turning them from sly character studies into comic gargoyles . . . Though each of the monologues holds your attention, it often seem as if the characters are being impersonated instead of incarnated. This means that while the jokes almost always go over, they can feel like cartoon captions instead of involuntary hiccups of personality. Then, of course, there's the matter of making speeches stageworthy that were devised for the confessional privacy of a television camera."[2]
In their reviews for CurtainUp, Jerry Weinstein observed, "While there's nothing to prevent a contemporary staging of these plays, they have a decidedly 1950s postwar frisson," and Les Gutman called it "a very polished and satisfying evening of theater" and added, "There's more than a little irony in the snideness with which Bennett relates these stories. One can only wonder if, like many of his subjects, he's oblivious to it."[3]
Talking Heads won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment in 1992, with Bennett also winning the award for Best Actor in a Musical or Entertainment.
Alan Bennett won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play and was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play. The entire cast won the Obie Award for Outstanding Performance, and Lynn Redgrave won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play.