PEOPLE National Theatre/Lyttelton

Alan Bennett’s amusing satire is set in a grand old stately home in South Yorkshire. Built in 1465, cold and damp, it is sorely in need of repair. Its poverty-stricken owners are faced with a number of choices. The house could be sold to a consortium (money no object) who want to pull it down and rebuild it in Devon or Wiltshire, and only allow an elite to see its interior. It could be rented out on a regular basis to a film company who make porn movies. The contents could be auctioned off. Or it could all be given to the National Trust. That’s what the archdeacon, one of its owners, wants to happen. Her elder sister, not keen to have the general public traipsing through the rooms and invading her privacy, prefers the first two options. People, she contends, spoil things. Frances de la Tour is the elder sister, who looks like a bag-lady, lives in the past, and is still reading newspapers thirty years old. She gets a chance to wear her 1950’s wardrobe and is momentarily rejuvenated. Linda Bassett is her companion. Jean Cadell is the lesbian archdeacon and Nicholas Le Prevost, representing the National Trust, keen to fill the Trust’s coffers, latches on to anything tasteless and interactive. He anticpates that a row of chamber pots, filled with the urine of famous visitors (including Rudyard Kipling, Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy) and which have been lovingly preserved in a cupboard, could easily become a major tourist attraction. The high spot of Nicholas Hytner’s production is the actual transformation, before our very eyes, of the stately room from dirty dust-sheet squalor to spotlessly clean and its former Robert Adams neoclassical grandeur.