Forty Years on Bbc Radio 4 Full Cast Dramatisation

by Alan Bennett

The Headmaster has been at Albion House for fifty years, man and boy. Now he is retiring and takes part in the end-of-year entertainment for the last time. Entitled Speak For England, Arthur , it weaves together a multi-generational story of the glorious era at the turn of the century, when the summers were always golden; the fast-living inter-war years peopled by the Bloomsbury Group; and the growing cynicism of a country going to war twice in so many decades.Tongue-in-cheek, the play-within-a-play prompts an outraged response from the Headmaster, who can only see his beloved standards being mocked. Yet within the parody lies an almost-painful nostalgia for a more peaceful age and the timeless misunderstanding of one generation by another.Clever, funny and poignant, Alan Bennett's masterful play is rightly regarded as a modern classic. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 28 August 2000.2 CDs. 1 hr 44 mins.

Genres: Plays, Classics, Humor, Comedy, Theatre

Audio Cassette

First published April 1, 1985

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Alan Bennett is an English author and Tony Award-winning playwright. Bennett's first stage play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio plays followed, along with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose and broadcasting, and many appearances as an actor. Bennett's lugubrious yet expressive voice (which still bears a slight Leeds accent) and the sharp humour and evident humanity of his writing have made his readings of his own work (especially his autobiographical writing) very popular. His readings of the Winnie the Pooh stories are also widely enjoyed.

Reviews

[[ J o ] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Country is park and shore is marina, spare time is leisure and more, year by year. We have become a battery people, a people of underprivileged hearts fed on pap in darkness, bred out of all taste and season to savour the shoddy splendours of the new civility. The hedges come down from the silent fields. The lease is out on the corner site. A butterfly is an event.

Forty Years On was Alan Bennett's very first West End Play, set in the fictional Public School Albion House. The school is putting on an end-of-year play for the parents, which brings forth the medium of having a play-within-a-play. The within-play sees three people living through the World War, whereas the without-play sees the Public School boys and masters try and enact this play, with many interruptions and discourses.

It also sees the old fashioned, last generation Headmaster make way for the new Headmaster who appears to have ways that break and denounce tradition, which reflects the transition of the old Empire Britain in to the new, World-Wars surviving Britain. A changed Britain: a modern Britain, but at what cost? And at what cost to education are new ideas and old traditions brought in and taken away?

You can tell this is one of Bennett's earlier plays because the humour isn't as sharp and quite often there are some very blunt moments, and the whole story itself seems to stutter ever so slightly. The play-within-the-play is a narration of Great Britain as it goes through the changes of coming out of being an excellent empire, through two world wars and falling in a heap out of the other side.

We have Bennett's natural talent speaking for itself, for the most part. There are some very obvious jokes and some you must roll your eyes at, but the humour is both English and Bennett and nothing is better. I find it hard to rate plays, because they include none of the things I love about reading: description, character and world-building, and I need to see a play in order to really rate it, but Forty Years On spoke to me on a level that not many books can do.

"The Battle of Britain was 23 years ago and the world has forgotten it. Those young men, so many of whom I knew, flew up in to the air and died for us and all we believed in and all we believe in has so changed that they needn't have really died at all. It was all a nonsense." - Noël Coward

Great Britain has never known what to do with itself ever since the Empire was dissolved. How can a country even get over something like that, without having been defeated or invaded to the point of changing its identity completely?

This is what Alan Bennett is saying, though being a young playwright he only scratches the surface of it. Forty Years after the war-any war-and it seems as if it mightn't have happened at all, for all the good it seems to have done us. Time moves on a things that happen were only things that happened: things to be discussed.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

.

[Marius van Blerck · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was greatly privileged to see Alan Bennett and Sir John Geilgud (as the headmaster) in this creation of Bennett's in the West End at the tail-end of the ‘swinging sixties’ (1969 to be precise). It's a quirky read, well worth taking the trouble. I also listened to the audiobook version, and it does justice to the play, with one exception – only strains of the classic “The dogs they had a party” can be heard, as the victorious rugby team return. A full rendition was called for! Be warned – there is no slapstick stuff here. The humour ranges from the subtle and laconic to the lavatorial.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From BBC radio 4 Extra:
Alan Bennett stars in his own darkly comic requiem for a lost England. With Eleanor Bron, Adam Godley and Robert Bathurst. From August 2000.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007...

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007...

Description: Albion House's retiring headmaster is outraged by the school's traditional end-of-year play which is being produced by his successor. The headmaster can only see his beloved standards being mocked. Yet within the parody lies a painful nostalgia for a more peaceful, vanished age.

Starring Alan Bennett as the Headmaster, Eleanor Bron as Matron, Robert Bathurst as Franklin, Adam Godley as Tempest, Auriol Smith as Miss Nisbitt, Nicholas Boulton as the Teacher, Ilan Goodman as the Head Boy and Gavin Muir as the Radio Voice.

Other parts played by Hassan Akram. Luke Blackall. Mark Lowen, Nicholas Netzgen, Tom Milner, Marcus Mumford, Hiten Pankhania, Matthew Poulson, Jack Schennum, Ripton Scott, Simon Spiro and other pupils from King's College School, Wimbledon.

Choir boys: Dominic Conte and Luke Eastman.

Original music by Colin Sell, performed by members of the East 15 Acting School.

[Mark Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to this on audio book with a cast, it is a play. I love it and have listened to it many times.
Beautifully written, funny and nostalgic.
A journey through a mythical 20th century England that never was but lingers on in the minds of the Brexiteers.

[Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like a good play, but this one is really different than an I can remember. It’s not one story; it’s a montage, a randomized collection of memories, songs, speeches, scenes - they are set between WWI and WWII, all in England. It works. A sense of courage and chaos, patriotism and desperation, endurance and fear - everything comes together while England waits.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

40 Years On by Alan Bennett
Iridescent comedy!

Since I have read The Madness of King George, The History Boys, Kafka’s Dick and a few other works by Alan Bennett, I am enchanted with the author.
The major themes, the humor and the seriousness with which they are alternatingly treated have charmed me completely.

In 40 Years On we have the familiar issues of education – or schooling, as the headmaster prefers to think of it- history and its peculiar details, looked upon with jocularity, famous authors and politicians.
The headmaster is played by Alan Bennett himself and has an outdated perspective that even he admits, albeit unconsciously:

- My standards are outdated of course! Standards are meant to be that way!

When the new headmaster will take office, since he has liberal views, the same reactionary older man is of the opinion that:

- The new headmaster will surely eliminate punishment on the ground that the more sensitive boys will not suffer anymore
- But sensitive boys suffer anyway so all this is pointless

A cornucopia of luminaries, leaders, princes, philosophers and writers are included, some of them making cameo appearances.

Of Lawrence of Arabia we hear that he had in his company a young, handsome boy and that he used make –up, with the inference that he preferred same sex relationships (?)

There is a small part for Bertrand Russell, who talks to a lady at the seaside and makes a timid advance, more or less like:

- We should get into a relationship, starting on the 4th, at 2 p.m. on the peer

It is not a quote and could be far from what was actually said, but it is this message that stick with me, the same as the next impression:

- Bertrand Russell could only discover his body at the age of 11 and he found his legs after which he deducted or used logic to discover the hands…

A teacher is asking pupils about the successor to Queen Victoria, after they sing a song that has nearly all the kings and queens nicely piled up in verse.
When one does not know, another comes with the right answer:

- Edward VII
- What do you know about him?
- He was fat
- No! He was Very fat!

After this remark, all sorts of anecdotes are unveiled about the heavy set monarch, with the potatoes that are prepared and given to the poor, the fact that he ate four times more than an ordinary man and one subject has even suggested that he attaches balloons to his knees to move with more ease.

We then move on, if not consequently, in another small episode, to the problem of Edward VIII and the American Mrs. Wallis Simpson, which is treated in a dialogue that in my mind sounds like this:

- That woman represents the evil!
- She is divorced, by Jesus!
- This is what the clique of Jewish, International Pederast association that call themselves The Labor Party wants!!

In another passage I laughed at the woman who is knitting and talking about the latest developments of the war and the air raids

- I may be a German spy! A parachutist!
- German parachutists do not knit!

There are serious tones and the drama of the war is evidenced, in one chapter there are comparisons made between the two World Wars:

- It will be over by Christmas…
- That’s what they said in the last one…
- Why do we fight?
- Like the last time for honor and…I forgot!


Iridescent work!!

[Brian Gowthorpe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just outstanding and every bit as funny as I remember it. What he satirises, including Oscar Wilde and Bulldog Drummond was already long in the tooth at the time but the books and plays were still part of school life when Alan Bennett was young and so they were in my time almost a generation later. WWI had ended less than 50 years before the play was first performed in 1968 and WWII only 13 years before. Beyond the Fringe had already dared to have a good go at debunking WWII and the writing in Forty Years On suggests that Alan Bennett must have been responsible for writing many of the sketches in that groundbreaking revue.

John Gielgud made the part of the headmaster his own and I had him firmly in mind as I was reading the play. And Nanny made me fall about just as much as the first time that I saw FYO in an amateur performance in Oxford, which was probably in about 1974. The set design and stage directions are relatively prescriptive: AB had a clear idea of what he wanted.

[Douglas Cosby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid early Bennett play. This play within a play is set in a British boarding school called "Albion", a literary/poetic word referring to ancient Britain, and "the idea of "Albion" pervades the play as the old, retiring headmaster fights against the inexorable modern views that have crept into his school. The play looks back on WWI and WWII and how these wars accelerated the natural move away from Albion. Darkly comedic and cynical, the play-within-a-play is not the only complexity Bennett gives us here: the scenes bop around with a semi-random feel, but it all makes good enough sense; although I am still not sure exactly what happened. In other words, reading or seeing this more than once would still be good fun. Probably should be 3 stars, but I am a fool for smart, quick British dialog.

[Ryan Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forty Years On is a 1968 play by Alan Bennett and his first West End play. Although I'd read loads of his other stuff I'd never read this one. It takes its name from the Harrow School song. The play is set in a British public school called Albion House. It's a story about Britain's proud past and uncertain future. The school setting is a precursor to 'The History Boys' and you could imagine a film of this book being in a similar context. It's a very clever play and the play within the play is the real star. As the play's characters are taken through 19-14 > 1918 and 1939 >45, we learn more about the play's main characters, the history of Britain's 20th-century wars, and Alan Bennett's witty comedic dialogue adds to this book's incredibly clever prose.

[Dane Cobain · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a little bit of a history nerd and so there was a lot here for me to like. I also liked the way that it used a play within a play, although that’s probably because I like meta stuff in general. It’s probably one of my favourite Bennett plays so far, so yeah!

[Plum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the difference between the boys’ opinions that are realised in the play and the headmaster’s opinions. Fabulous

[Chambers Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Past its prime.

[Ben Ockrim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really warmed to the character of the Headmaster, and liked how the play explored a non-deterministic view of History.

[Matthew Oglesby · Rating 4 out of 5]

book 1, 2023

[Miriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You can’t expect to agree with everything. One generation treading on the toes of its predecessors- that is what tradition means.”

“War is a strange alchemist.”

“I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control! … Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?…Of course they’re out of date! Standards always are out of date! That is what makes them standards.”

[Vel Veeter]

An earlier play by Alan Bennett that involves a play within a play at a public school during a kind of school festival. We are many years past the end of the first World War in which the head master of the school is reflecting back on his time sense. This is a kind of Goodbye Mr Chips kind of thing. But within this framing we also have the play that the students put on, in which among other scenes, they put the afterlife of Neville Chamberlain on trial for his cowardice and capitulation. Is it fair? I am not to say, but the students’ vitriol and moral clarity (earnest, but unreasonable) says otherwise.

[Louise Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not read an alan bennett play before i enjoyed it as a whole although may seem a bit dated and a life time not a generation away from school today , rarthe amused to see it is a play with in a play err midsumer nights dream springs to mind of course we had the famous saying s abt the war and this is the war to end all wars as go throught history and other bits in history brought alight like Edward and mrs simpson your could tell it was bennett earlier work though !!!! but reading more with interest

[Schaza Askar · Rating 3 out of 5]

''Forty years On'' is Alan Bennett's first stage play. The play is set in 1968 at a boys’public school called Albion House ("Albion" is an ancient word for Britain). The play within the play is about the changes that had happened to the country following the end of the Great War in 1918.

[Roma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Alan Bennett's work, but I wasn't English enough to fully appreciate this.

[Kariss Ainsworth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit messy and doesn't really go anywhere but has it's moments