Maintaining the Audience's Interest in Talking Heads

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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 “I said I was getting upset, like I

did before…” 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. “They don’t expect you to be an atheist when you’re a

miss…” 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

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