Maintaining the Audiences Interest in Talking Heads :: Talking Heads Alan Bennet Essays

Maintaining the Audience's Interest in Talking Heads One character talking to a camera for half an hour, Do you call that drama? How does Alan Bennet try to maintain the audience’s interest in his Talking Heads? In A Lady of Letters, Patricia Routledge plays the part of Irene Ruddock, who is a very lonely woman that has an obsession with writing letters to everyone to complain about the smallest of things. She lives by herself, and has done since her mother died. A Lady of Letters is a drama because it includes different amounts of lighting at certain points of the video. Routledge also acts when she is speaking to the camera, for example she gets very upset at some points e.g. when she talks about when the police told her the little boy over the road had died of leukaemia. She also expresses herself well by her actions. At first Irene seems like a very highly classed woman, very respectable and knows what is wrong and right. She also appears to be a very respectable lady. We know this because in the video, it shows her having her tea and biscuits with a napkin. However, throughout the video, we see some changes to Irene; we see that she might not be as respectable as we first thought. One of these reasons is because when she goes to the doctors, she says â€Å"I said I was getting upset, like I did before†¦Ã¢â‚¬  This indicates that she may have been ill because of certain happenings which were probably to do with the letters which she writes. Shortly after this, she lets us know about when the vicar came around, talking to her about god. She then tells us about how she is an Atheist. We do not expect this because you would have thought someone as respectable as Irene would believe in God and go to church every Sunday morning. â€Å"They don’t expect you to be an atheist when you’re a miss†¦Ã¢â‚¬  This shows that because she told the Vicar that she was an atheist, he did not know what to say, because he like us expected her to believe in God and go to church like every other respectable lady like her. Next we hear about her visit from the Police, which is where we find out what she really is like. At first, the male police man talks about the different types of letters which she had wrote in the past, and then we find out that she has been told to keep the peace by the courts. At this point, we finally realise that she isn’t that