Playwright (The History Boys) and actor Alan Bennett gives us a pair of spritely novellas about the perils and sometimes ironic consequences of sexual desire.
The protagonist of "The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson" is a 55-year-old woman "beached on the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been, she supposed, like many others... happy to begin with, then satisfactory and finally dull." But Jane Donaldson's life takes a decidedly unusual turn when her two young lodgers offer to allow her to observe their lovemaking in lieu of their overdue rent payments. Uncomfortable as she is at first with the offer, when the young couple departs she realizes the experience has "left her with a curiosity, a prurience even, that associating it with freedom, release and a new life, she was not now anxious to suppress." And it enables her to deal deftly with the persistent advances of Dr. Ballyntyne, whose acerbic comments on the performance of the medical students under his tutelage are comic highlights of this gentle story.
One almost needs a scorecard to keep track of the erotic permutations in "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes." Graham Forbes decides to marry Betty Greene, a woman "not nearly as good looking as himself and even slightly older." But Graham may not be the man his mother believes him to be, and the elder Mr. Forbes's dissatisfaction in his own marriage leads to a deepening of his relationship with his daughter-in-law that might charitably be described as unconventional. A male prostitute enters into this ménage à quatre, and the betrayals and acts of duplicity multiply with dizzying speed and to startling and ultimately hilarious effect. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer