The Laying On Of Hands » (First Edition)

Alan Bennett is a renowned playwright and essayist, whose screenplay for The Madness of King George was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the author of The Clothes They Stood Up In and Writing Home. He lives in London, England.

Alan Bennett’s extraordinary ear for dialogue and sharpness of perception have made him a master storyteller. In “Father! Father! Burning Bright” he writes with tragicomic insight about a son’s vigil at his father’s deathbed where their lifelong battle continues to the end. “The Laying on of Hands,” a brilliantly funny satire, describes a society memorial service for a rather special masseur who died tragically young; and in “Miss Fozzard Finds her Feet,” a lonely, unmarried department store clerk discovers there’s more to life than looking after her brother through her only indulgence, her podiatrist.

New Yorker

A celebrity-studded High Church funeral for a gifted masseur with (it turns out) catholic tastes; a lovelorn spinster who finds fulfillment at the hands of a podiatrist; and a hen-pecked husband at the bedside of his interminably dying father are the subjects of these three very funny stories by the British playwright. Bennett's genius is for the imploding situation in which a cleverly made house of cards shudders and comes down; the comments of his characters as they nimbly pick their way around the wreckage ("I suppose there's a word for what I'm doing," the spinster says, "but . . . I skirt around it") verge on aphorism.