Alan Bennett, who first came to fame in 'Beyond the Fringe',has written several plays and he describes in his book 'Writing Home' a great deal of the hassle he went through before it was finally produced. In the extract below he tells how he was involved in the auditioning of boys for the numbers of public schoolboys featured in the play, which was set in Albion House a run-down public school on the South Downs. The date was the 9th of July 1968.

The second day spent auditioning boys at Her Majesty's. When I first arrive at the stage door I am put at the end of the line. Since we had advertised for boys of fifteen to eighteen this flatters me, until I see that some are considerably older - and seem increasingly so as the day draws on: by the time five o'clock comes round I would not have been surprised to see Lewis Casson walk out on to the stage.
We are looking for public schoolboys and find very few. They have regional accents which they do not attempt to disguise. Had one advertised for public schoolboys, fifteen or twenty years ago they would have come in neat flannel suits with plastered-down hair. They wouldn't have been any better as actors, but at least they would have looked the part. Nowadays the fashion in looks and the fashion in actors has changed. They turn up in matador pants, turtle-neck shirts, a few rings on each hand. We ask them to read a passage from Leonard Woolf's autobiography 'Beginning Again'.
'Who am I supposed to be, then?' asks one kid with golliwog hair and velveteen pants. 'Leonard Woolf?'
Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood - youth, gaiety, innocence - have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in 'Oliver'. Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nations youth like the 1914-18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.
Often I am aching with silent laughter, which I hide by writing endless notes on my list. 'Too old'. 'Too common'. 'Sly face. Fat arse. Possible'.
'I was at drama school,' says one, 'near Doncaster.'
We need not only actors, but also musicians. 'Do you play any musical instrument?' 'Not quite.'
One is called Lionel Barrymore.
Another, explaining the fact that he has not been working, says cryptically, 'You see,I damaged my leg.' 'Perhaps somebody pulled it,' murmurs Toby.
In the afternoon, when we have been going about an hour, there is a quavering voice from the upper circle: 'Could you tell me when you are going to start, please?' It is an old lady who has come for the matinee of Fiddler on the Roof on the wrong day.
We see about one hundred boys in two days. Sixteen are possible. We find a horn player, a trumpeter and a flautist and a boy whose voice has broken but who has retained a lovely high treble voice besides.
At the start I had wondered how one would ever tell whether they were suitable or not. But it is just like marking scholarship papers at Oxford: the boys with vitality and enthusiasm walk in; the painstaking ones are put straight away on one side.
We arrange to put an advert in the 'Times' in an effort to tap new non-showbiz sources. It's a thin bag, but my agents say that all the likeliest boys have already been snapped up for the musical Mr Chips.

ALAN BENNETT

It's a heartbreaking business for the rejected ones and we've all seen those queues of boys and girls which go all the way round the block. RS