Written by Alan Bennett Date premiered 15 October 1980 Genre Dark comedy Playwright Alan Bennett | Characters 6. Original language English First performance 15 October 1980 Place premiered Vaudeville Theatre | |
Setting Back-to-back house in Leeds Similar Talking Heads, Beyond the Fringe, Forty Years On, The History Boys, The Habit of Art | ||
Enjoy 2010
Enjoy is a comedy play written in 1980 by Alan Bennett. An idiosyncratic view of working-class family life in Leeds, a city in the north of England, it was one of the rare theatrical flops in Bennett's career.
An elderly couple living in one of the last back-to-back houses in Leeds encounter a series of jolting surprises, not least when their son returns, as a council official in drag, and reveals that the council intends to demolish their house brick by brick, and reassemble it in the local museum, complete with its occupants.
Following a national tour, directed by Ronald Eyre, it opened at the Vaudeville Theatre, in London's West End on 15 October 1980, but in spite of the stellar cast of Joan Plowright, Colin Blakely, Susan Littler, Marc Sinden, Philip Sayer and Liz Smith (who replaced Joan Hickson during rehearsals), it closed on 6 December 1980.
Twenty-nine years later, a new production of Enjoy toured and then moved to the Gielgud Theatre in January 2009. This time the play was described as "an astonishingly prescient, blackly comic modern classic". Starring Alison Steadman and David Troughton, it reportedly took over £1m in advance ticket sales.