Alan Bennett - Talking Heads

This collection includes the first and second series of Talking Heads, twelve monologues in all, together with the introductions I wrote for each series. However, it seems appropriate to include with them an earlier monologue, A Woman of No Importance, which was first televised in 1982 and for which I did this introduction.

I wrote A Woman of No Importance thinking I might direct it myself. I have never directed either for the stage or television and the possibility of having to do so accounts for the simplicity (not to say crudity) of the form: the piece is for one actress, who speaks directly to camera.

Thinking I would be able to manage at the most two cameras, I planned the play as a series of midshots with the camera tracking in very slowly to a close-up, holding the close-up for a while then, just as slowly, coming out again. I didnt figure on there being any cuts within scenes, though this would place a heavy burden on the performer, some sections being pretty lengthy: the first speech, for instance lasts twelve minutes. To shoot in such a way makes cutting virtually impossible: one fluff, and its back to the top of the scene again. Autocue is one answer, but Patricia Routledge, for whom the piece was written, was anxious to avoid this, and quite rightly. Even when a performer is in full command of the text, the sight of it slowly reeling down over the camera lens exercises an hypnotic effect, and an element of the rabbit fascinated by the snake enters in. I therefore planned on using a second camera, shooting Miss Schofield in profile. This would provide a shot to which one could cut if it proved necessary to do so.

In the event, because I was working on one of the other plays, I didnt direct the piece, which was done by Giles Foster. He adhered faithfully to the form Id given the play, though to begin with finding the restrictions it imposed irksome and unnerving. He began by moving the play around, with Miss Schofield traversing the studio to match the movements described in the text. Rehearsal was a process of simplification whereby these movements were taken back inside the character, who ended up static in front of the camera as I had originally imagined. There are in fact some cuts within sections, when a gesture or slight turn of the head make it possible to switch to a slightly different shot without being false to the fairly relentless nature of the piece. Of course such directness and simplicity may not be thought to work. Talking heads is a synonym in television for boredom, and here is just one head, not two. And Miss Schofield is a bore. But to have her in full close-up, retailing in unremitting detail how she borrowed the salt in the canteen takes one, I hope, beyond tedium.

The first few lines of the play are poached. In the Festival of Britain, which I visited as a boy, there was a pavilion (I suspect I might be irritated by it now) called The Lion and the Unicorn, devoted to Englishness. It included a console where, by pressing a button, one heard snatches of typical English conversation. These had been written by (I think) Stephen Potter and were performed by Joyce Grenfell. One in particular concerned a disaster that befell a middle-class lady, and began: I was perfectly all right on the Monday. I was perfectly all right on the Tuesday. I was perfectly all right on the Wednesday. I was perfectly all right on the Thursday until lunchtime, when I just ate a little poached salmon: five minutes later I was rolling about the floor.

With the experience accumulated from the later monologues there are other observations I can add about the technique appropriate for their presentation. The more still (and even static) the speaker is the better the monologue works. However much the text might seem to demand it too much movement dissipates interest and raises awkward questions, chief among them, Whom does this person think theyre talking to? Whereas if the speaker is relatively still and the camera has them in a medium to close shot such questions do not arise. I dont know why this should be but it is so.

There are also certain patterns in the form which, to begin with, I was unaware of but which I now see are essential to the action and for all that there is just one person talking there is quite a bit of action. A section will often end with a seemingly throwaway remark that carries the plot forward: Violets remarks about Francis at the end of several of the sections of Waiting for the Telegram chart his separate decline; in The Outside Dog Marjorys, He seems to have lost another anorak, this one furlined, strikes the first note of unease about her murderous husband; and in Playing Sandwiches Wilfreds On my way home I called in at the sweet shop, alerts the audience to the fact that something dreadful is about to happen. And, of course, by the beginning of the next section it has happened as the action of these stories generally takes place in the intervals between sections, what has happened recalled by the speaker rather than narrated as it occurs.

It would be quite possible to tell these stories in a different (and a more conventional) way, a question that will be found in the introduction to the first Talking Heads series.