Although not a prolific playwright, Alan Bennett (born 1934) earned a solid reputation as one of Britain's finest writers for the stage and television.

In the summer of 1960 in Edinburgh there burst onto the British theater scene a revue which made immediate stars of its four author/participants--Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore. Taken to London the following spring, Beyond the Fringe won the Evening Standard award as the best play; in New York it won the Antoinette Perry Award (Tony) and the New York Drama Critics Circle award for 1963. Robert Brustein wrote of the series of 23 sketches lampooning religion, the royal family, war, pornography, and Shakespearean history plays that it had "no firm moral center ..." and that it was "immoderate, irresponsible, ... totally destructive ... and violently funny." Several decades later, after Monty Python and Saturday Night Live on opposite sides of the Atlantic, it seems quite...