Balancing Acts by Nicholas Hytner

Author:Nicholas Hytner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

I first went to Alan’s house, where the lady in the van lived, in the autumn of 1989, a few months after she died. After I moved to Camden Town in the early 1980s, I used to take the detour around Gloucester Crescent on my way to the High Street, mainly to try to work out which creative titan lived where. The crescent was home to any number of writers, film and theatre directors, publishers, journalists and artists; and although I discovered that Alan lived at 23, I had no idea what the yellow van was about, though I wondered whether the derelict old lady who appeared to live in it was his mother.

I didn’t think to ask about her when I finally arrived in the study; nor did most of the people who visited the house when she was in the drive. I only realised what I’d missed when Alan finally wrote about her in the London Review of Books. Her fame spread in 1999 when Maggie Smith played her on stage. Now, in 2014, Alan was offering for the film the real house in the real street where it all happened.

He insists that there was nothing remarkable, and certainly nothing kind, about what strikes everyone else as fifteen years of lunatic self-sacrifice. He invited Miss Shepherd to park her van in his drive for a month or two, “just till you sort yourself out,” and she stayed until she died of old age. Many of the residents of Gloucester Crescent have been there for decades, and shuddered in horror when the van made its ghostly reappearance. The view from the study window helped me understand how Alan survived. I’d sat with him there often enough over the years, but it was only when the van was in situ that I started to get some sense of it as it must have been to the writer who sat at the desk, looking at it. For the part of him that never left the study, the chaos was there not to be suffered, but to be recorded.

So although the movie showed how it actually was, where it actually happened, it isn’t literally the thing itself.

This really happened:

(AB approaches the van.)

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