It lacks the intellectual heft of The History Boys but the new National Theatre Live* play from the withering pen of the ageless Alan Bennett is tidy and enjoyable entertainment.
The "people" of the title - the word should be pronounced with a tone of distaste - are the earnest visitors who will pour through Stacpoole House, a stately pile in South Yorkshire, if it is handed over to the National Trust.
That is the prospect faced by the penniless hereditary owner, Dorothy (de la Tour), who inhabits the crumbling building with her crumbling companion, Iris (Bassett). They have to fight off Dorothy's scheming sister June, a lesbian archdeacon (you get the drift); an oily auctioneer (Jupp); and the National Trust man (Le Prevost).
As director Hytner points out in a short introductory interview, the frequency with which the characters deny that the house is a metaphor for the nation ("I will not be metaphorised," booms Dorothy at one point) rather underlines the inescapability of that reading.
And there's no doubt that Bennett has in his sights the commodification of heritage - and everything else; June floats the fundraising idea of a "celebrity Eucharist" - in a post-Thatcherite Britain. The trouble is that he does so none too elegantly. The film feels at times like a rehearsal of ideas which, solid though they may be, are laid out a tad too explicitly. Matters become even more problematic in the second half when Dorothy opens the door to a porn-movie shoot and the play veers close to bawdy farce.
