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Starry new productions of Alan Bennett’s tragicomic Talking Heads are under way, but how do you make a monologue compelling? It’s a test of true acting

- Michael Billington

SOME bright news: the BBC is going to film new productions of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. What is more, two fresh pieces are being added to the original 10 monologues and the impressively starry list of performers includes Jodie Comer, Tamsin Greig, Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton and Harriet Walter. As Bennett fans know, these are wistfully tragicomic pieces that explore various forms of quiet desperation, and that work equally as memorably on stage as they do on TV.

In theory, the theatrical monologue shouldn’t work—we look for conflict and opposition in drama. Putting a solo performer in the spotlight seems like a denial of what theatre is all about. In his book about Broadway, The Season, William Goldman tells a wonderful story about a customer coming out of Judy Garland’s one-woman show and saying to his companion: ‘But is it theatre?’ The companion replies: ‘It had better be, because it sure as hell ain’t singing.’

You can broadly divide solo performances into two categories. There is the one-person play, in which an actor assumes a character—recent examples include the phenomenal Phoebe Waller- Bridge in Fleabag, derived from TV, Maggie Smith in A German Life and Laura Linney in My Name Is Lucy Barton. Then there’s the solo show, in which the performer’s personality is undisguised, as in Sir Ian McKellen’s recent tour de force, or in which a biographical portrait is offered —Simon Callow’s life-enhancing studies of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde leap to mind.