Lady in the Van

Genre: Comedy Characters: 9 males, 5 females Scenery: Various sets Alan Bennett draws from his memoirs to offer a dramatized account of the genteel vagrant, Miss Shepard, who parked her van in his driveway for fifteen years. Maggie Smith starred in London's West End. "A wonderfully bittersweet comic diary of the years in which a lethally dotty and very smelly old bat parked her unroadworthy vehicle in Bennett's Camden garden, thereby providing him with roughly equal amounts of good journalistic copy and guilty landlord irritation." -Spectator "Hilarious...A consistently enjoyable entertainment." -The New York Times "Without doubt, the best new play of the year." -Daily Telegraph "Bennett's writing is nimble, ironical, cruel and humane...Gives the West End one of its saddest, funniest, and most distinguished offerings for years." -London Times