A BITTERSWEET comic play will be staged by Weymouth Drama Club.

Their production The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett will be performed at Weymouth Pavilion next month/

This challenging play is a bitter-sweet comic, real-life diary of Miss Shepherd, an elderly lady with a hidden and guilty past, who lived in a van in Bennett’s garden in North London for 15 years.

The play follows her arrival in Gloucester Crescent, NW1 in the mid-70s, her meeting and humorous interactions with Bennett, his neighbours and Authority as they gradually, and reluctantly come to accept her eccentric ways as well as her various vans and cars intruding on the peace of a quiet north London suburb. Her gradual decline, gentle death and unexpected ascension show the sensitivity, perception and humour of Bennett as a playwright.

Directed by Cherralyn Bush, the cast includes Anne White as Miss Shepherd with John Bower and Rob Tripp as the two Alan Bennetts, with other long-established actors from the drama club, plus a number of newcomers to the club’s line-up, to bring alive Miss Shepherd and all her quirkiness.

The play was made into a film in 2015 starring Maggie Smith as Miss Shepherd.

*Weymouth Drama Club's The Lady in the Van, Weymouth Pavilion, April 27 to 29. Tickets cost £12.50 and are available from the Weymouth Pavilion box office or from the Pavilion's website.

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