Habeas Corpus

Author: Alan Bennett
Director: Richard Bond

About "Habeas Corpus" - the play by Alan Bennett

It originally opened at The Lyric Theatre on 10th May 1973, starring Sir Alec Guiness.

Michael Billington of The Guardian said of the play   'Mr Bennett has now written a gorgeously vulgar but densely plotted farce that is a downright celebration of sex and the human body. The effect is like seeing a McGill postcard in which the captions have been written by an eloquent verbal stylist.....Bennett starts outs with a set of comic stereotypes: lecherous GP, unscaleably mountainous wife, celibate Canon, flat-chested spinster, cantilevered sexpot, invertebrate hypochondriac and arrogant colonialist. he then sets the puppets in motion by assuming they are all in the grip of some overriding physical obsession: the doctor by unassauagable lust, the breastless wonder by the need for an uplift, the unfired canon by the loss of virginity. Identities are mistaken, wires are crossed and it is typical of Bennett's method that a falsie fitter, fresh from a crash course in Leatherhead, should stumble into the proceedings aiming his prehensile fingers at all the wrong bosoms.'