Alan Bennett: My diaries are joke books Bennett's eminence in the theatre, though not entirely eclipsed, was always downplayed. He spoke of acting alongside Maggie Smith (who he smilingly called a "fierce, demented, deluded woman") while humbly confessing to being "overpowered" by her. Talking about the Old Hollywood stars he had met, Claudette Colbert among them, Bennett retained the awe of the boy who "used to queue to see them at the picturedrome." Returning to his childhood, the playwright told of a school rumour that his loathed gym teacher, Mr King, had passed away. Shuffling into school assembly that day, Bennett was floored to discover that "it was George VI, not Mr King, who had died." This intimate audience with Bennett rather unravelled the neuroses of Untold Stories, the play in which he frets that his childhood was thoroughly uninteresting and almost non-existent. Even a small selection of tales from his youth had the audience in stitches. Though invited to a Q&A, the group were visibly disappointed when Bennett put down his diary and invited Alex Jennings, the actor who plays him in Untold Stories, to field questions. Asked if he had this dry sense of humour as a child, Bennett confesses: "I was a terrible child. I used to show off. I didn't know I could make people laugh until I went in the army...you needed it, as a kind of defence. As a child I just remember being odious. And did his parents know of his success? Their attitude to the theatre was the same as it was to university, they weren't sure what it was and what I did there but they were happy to leave me to it. He remembers spying on the pair watching a performance of Habeas Corpus in 1973. My dad was sitting there with a huge smile on his face. Not because he was enjoying it but he was pleased everyone else was enjoying it. But it wasn't up his street at all...it was what he'd call "cheeky." I couldn't have written the plays I have while they were alive. They would have been shocked by them. This talk of parental censorship set the stage for the following performance of Cocktail Sticks, one of the two plays that make up Untold Stories. The production sees Bennett confronting his dead mother and father, both vibrant and lively characters. At one point the caretaker says to Bennett "I don't care how celebrated you are, you'll never be a patch on your dad." But while the audience at last night's Q&A may not have been acquainted with Walter Bennett, they rose to their feet to thank his son for appearing and, as always, for making them smile.