She makes her sons into miniature husband-figures from their. But you can also hear inverted pre-echos of the Auden gag in the various scenes here where a miner's grime is held against him by would-be genteel wives on a sort of “you're-too-filthy-to-use-my-lovely-towels” or, in effect, “go and use another bathroom before you use mine”. David Herbert Lawrence is one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century. In Bennett's version, a certain something arises that suggests that the dear departed is perhaps not as dead as they had supposed. We know that Bennett attended Peter Gill's landmark Lawrence revivals at the Royal Court in the mid-1960s and that, in Enjoy (1980) he wickedly parodied the scene in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, where the wife and mother ritually washed the corpse of previous hated miner-husband, killed in a pit accident. To quote from memory: “where did you wash your hands, after you'd washed your hands?” Amongst the many revelatory marvels in this magnificent, deeply attuned evening – which present three of D H Lawrence's stage masterpieces, written between 19, as a single composite drama – is a startled sense of how strong an influence the Prophet of Eastwood exerted on Leeds's finest flower. I've always loved Alan Bennett's great joke about the hygiene crime-scene that was W H Auden's bathroom in New York.
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