Six Plays by Alan Bennett: One Fine Day
In a rare straight acting role in this play, Irish comedian Dave Allen stars as estate agent George Phillips. He works for one of these large commercial estate agencies and his life is rather soured by the expectation that he get new office block Sunley House (almost universally referred to as White Elephant House) off their books, despite it being unfinished and never having been let after months on the books. In addition his secretary is rude to him, he has run over a hedgehog, his wife is going away, she hasn't bothered consulting him about whether their teenage son should have his girlfriend stay over, a younger residential agent in the office is pressuring to have a go at getting rid of Sunley House, his boss can't even remember anything about him, and he really isn't very happy.
In his difficult situation he takes refuge in, of all places, White Elephant House, and starts sleeping hidden away there, with only his beloved opera for company.
Brilliantly, the play contrasts the clarity and open spaces of the empty Sunley House with his complicated home and cluttered work, where frankly everyone is pretty terrible (they must have had fun being so awful to him). I have never been in an empty office block but all I can say is it's hugely visually effective, both the empty interiors with telephones all lined up on the floor and the scenes on the roof. Similarly the soundtrack is wonderful, arias from Puccini's Madam Butterfly playing throughout. For sheer visual and auditory beauty it's a bit hard to beat this one.
I commented on the visual of the telephones all lined up and there is an unspoken theme throughout the play of nobody listening to each other or even communicating in any way, perhaps best seen in the way Phillips keeps his headphones on at home and so doesn't communicate with his family. This sub=theme of communication is brought to ludicrous height when it is attempted to sell Sunley House to some Japanese businessman, with all the linguistic and cultural misunderstandings and assumptions that this involves. Incidentally it is during this attempted sale that the whole situation is dramatically resolved.
There is a magnificent twist in the plot but I'm not going to give it away in case you haven't seen it.
If the premise of a man sleeping in White Elephant House seems a bit far-fetched, it reminds me of a family friend years ago whose marriage broke up in circumstances I never knew. He moved out of the family house and started sleeping on the sofa in his office, which he did for months and months. He would go out to eat and kept his clothes and things in his car (I have no idea what he did about bathing but he must have had to go out to avoid the cleaners). In retrospect I wonder if he was alright because he was an architect so must have been earning enough to be able to buy or rent his own place or even check into a hotel and didn't have to sleep in the office. I had no idea how his situation ended (he would certainly be well ove retirement age by now so is definitely not still doing it). So the situation of sleeping in the office isn't as far-fetched as it might seem.
I have been racking my brain for something critical to say, and it's given me real trouble. The play rather pottles on at a clearly deliberately rather slow pace, reflecting Phillips's life and his attention to things which happen in it. For this reason there is a pattern in the play of focussing on things disproportionately: for example an encounter with the member of staff who looks after the agency's keys gains a disproportionate importance because of the significance of his getting a copy of the key cut, and moring conversations in the lift are also exaggerated because they clearly indicate Phillips's ennui at his life and irritation at pretty much everything surrounding him. However there is just one place where I think this deliberately off-kilter balance goes wrong, and that is in a scene where Phillips has gone to sleep in White Elephant House, leaving his son and his girlfriend alone in the house with his wife away. The son and his girlfriend move into their parents' bed to sleep, however the son doesn't feel like sex and the girlfriend is obviously not very happy about this. My only criticism of the play is about this sequence, where the deliberate uneven stressing of events in the play would have been much improved if the son and his girlfriend had actually had sex. It would have stressed that Phillips has been pushed out of the house, almost made impotent in this situation in contrast to his son, and forced to sleep in the building which is his bete noir at work. Instead we have a much more typical interpretation by Bennett, where neither father and son are - so to speak - 'potent', both fail and nobody ends up happy in any way.
I like this play hugely, and especially as it's an unusual straight acting role for Dave Allen.
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