'She’s A Real Survivor': The Incredible True Story Behind 'The Lady In The Van'

There’s a saying: house guests are a lot like fish – after three days, they stink. But apparently, that adage doesn’t extend to lodgers on the driveway, or at least the driveway of celebrated British playwright Alan Bennett. When, in the early 1970s, he invited a homeless woman to park the broken-down van she lived in outside his London home, she stayed considerably longer than three days. Fifteen years longer, in fact.

This extraordinary true story would be chronicled several times by Bennett, after Miss Mary Shepherd, otherwise known as “the lady in the van,” passed away in 1989. First written as a quasi-diarised essay, then as a novella and finally as a play that was adapted into a film in 2015, each iteration speaks to the uncanny serendipity of Bennett and Shepherd’s meeting; a storyteller drawn to unique lives and a woman with an astonishing life story to share.

“When you get into it, the reality of it, it really is crazy that this actually happened. It makes you think, what sort of person takes in someone who’s not only homeless but also quite a difficult personality as well,” says director Dean Bryant, whose new production of Bennett’s The Lady In The Van, for Melbourne Theatre Company, opens this month. “But interestingly, the more we’ve explored this character [Miss Shepherd], it’s actually her difficulty and this amazing self-confidence she has to push her will onto other people, that actually helps her survive such incredible circumstances. She’s a real survivor, she lives by her own rules, and that’s a fascinating thing.”

“When you get into it, the reality of it, it really is crazy that this actually happened."

You might assume, given the length of her stay, that Shepherd and Bennett shared a friendly co-existence. In fact, Shepherd’s eccentricities, her political beliefs, her paranoia and anxieties, and the indomitable ways she expressed them, were both fascinating and confounding to her unlikely landlord. Bennett’s desk faced a window through which he could see Miss Shepherd’s four-wheeled hovel, and her comings and goings, not to mention the confrontations she regularly engaged in, were so distracting, Bennett found it near impossible work from home. Even his attempts at being egalitarian were often thwarted; as Bennett wrote in his original essay, “One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.” 

And yet the ways in which Bennett chose to immortalise Shepherd reveal the touching quid pro quo they shared. Over the years, incredible truths about his unwanted tenant emerged; that she had been a gifted concert pianist, that she had once attempted to become a nun, that her brother had her committed to an asylum, and that she was convinced she was a fugitive from the police. “Bennett is a writer who writes about people he sees in the street. That has been his inspiration his whole creative life,” Bryant says. “So, there’s this idea that he is receiving just as much as she is receiving in terms of their relationship. She got somewhere to live and he got a great story, and crucially, an example of what it means to live a courageous or at least a vivid life.” 

Realising such a unique character on stage requires an actor of significant range. In the 2015 film adaptation, the role of Miss Shepherd is played by one of the greatest of the UK’s character actors, Dame Maggie Smith. In Melbourne, a homegrown titan of the theatre will be stepping into the role, Miriam Margolyes. “[The Lady In The Van] is one of my favourite plays of all time,” she told The Music. “It’s such a fascinating story. For some reason they’ve cast me as this cantankerous, smelly old lady. I’m not sure if I’ve been miscast or perfectly cast, but either way, I’m really looking forward to doing it.”

Bryant says he’s deliberately avoided seeing the film version, but that Margolyes was the only actor he could imagine doing the role of Miss Shepherd justice. “She is such a unique person and performer that I totally trust her response to this character and that it will create something vivid and grounded, that pushes the grittiness of the situation, while still honouring the rhythm and the comedy of the writing, and the fact that this play wants its audience to have a good laugh,” he explains. 

But it’s not just a rib-tickling Bryant hopes his audience takes with them from the show. Despite her formidable personality and laughable antics, Miss Shepherd’s vulnerability as a social outcast should also prompt some lingering reflection on social justice and the ways privilege can create prejudice. “I was so drawn to this story because it’s an opportunity to question the generosity in our society, or rather the lack of it, particularly at the present moment. We’ve lost something that our society once prided itself on, which is being giving and more open and supportive of the less fortunate among us. And this is a story about what it really means, individually, to be responsible for another person and to take that responsibility on, rather than it being prescribed by the state. It’s a really interesting piece where Miriam’s character says, ‘I won’t live by the rules of society. I will live as I choose and make society’s rules fit around me.’ And Alan Bennet himself saying, ‘Society is not going to properly look after this person. So somehow, I am going to give them a safe space myself.’” 

Melbourne Theatre Company presents The Lady In The Van from 2 Feb at Arts Centre Melbourne.