For the first time The Festival Players bring you three of Alan Bennett’s wonderful Talking Heads monologues:

A Lady of Letters, Bed among the Lentils and Her Big Chance were made famous on TV by Patricia Routledge, Maggie Smith and Julie Walters respectively.

In A Lady of Letters, Irene Ruddock's mother has died some years ago and she lives alone. A one-woman Neighbourhood Watch scheme, her habit of writing letters to the appropriate authorities gets ridiculously out of hand and lands he rin prison. There, ironically, Miss Ruddock finds freedom and is, for possibly the first time, happy.

In Bed Among the Lentils, Susan, an alcoholic, nervous vicar's wife who has to travel into Leeds to go to the off-licence because of her debts with the local shop keeper, distracts herself from her ambitious, and, as she sees him, vainly insensitive husband and his doting parishioners by conducting an affair with a nearby grocer, Ramesh Ramesh, discovering something about herself and God

In Her Big Chance meet Lesley, an actress who, after a series of unpromising extra roles on television programmes such as Crossroads, has just completed a video spends a remarkable amount of time topless and shoots a man with a harpoon gun. She tells all, blind to the sinister undertones of her story as well as to her own self-delusions and gullibility. 

"A touching and very funny playwright, Bennett manages to combine the satiric, cold eyed sharpness of Flaubert with an embracing human compassion." - The New York Post

CAST

Irene - Julie Easter

Susan - Amy Walters

Lesley - Victoria Price