Bypassing the Law in a Homeless Vehicle

Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van

Abstract

In The Lady in the Van, British playwright Alan Bennett recounts his two-decade acquaintance with a homeless woman who ended up living in a van in his driveway for 15 years. The story has gone through several incarnations, from Bennett’s diary entries (published 1989) to a stage play (1999) and a film adaptation (2015). Subverting and disabling the law and its institutions with the help of a vehicle is a key theme in all these versions of the story. Laws regulating the activities have notoriously criminalized poverty and excluded the poor from social and economic participation. This essay discusses how Bennett’s narrative and its adaptations expose and question the heteronormative, bourgeois-centric practices of anti-homeless laws via a disruption of dominant tropes of poverty and homelessness. The texts also grapple with the practical conflicts around invasion of personal space that are inevitable results of sharing space with a physically and mentally unstable person. A specific focus will be on the fluidity of the division between public and private spaces that requires constant negotiation.