"Patricia Routledge can land a phrase and turn a word with absolute truth and total precision,"

says director Edward Kemp.

"It's an extraordinary talent to be in the same room with."

Kicking off the 2007 Chichester Festival in the intimate Minerva Theatre, this Alan Bennett double bill had sold out by the first day of rehearsals. Routledge, of course, is a Chichester resident and a fond favourite with the festival, while Bennett has enjoyed a redoubling of acclaim following the recent success of The History Boys.

But the real fascination with Office Suite is the opportunity to see one of our most distinguished actors revisit roles written for her 30 years previously.

Turning Bennett's tender yet unsentimental eye to the world of desk-bound work, Green Forms and A Visit from Miss Prothero first aired on the BBC in 1978.

The latter saw Routledge play a brash, charmless secretary intent on shattering her former boss's contented retirement.

In the former, redundancy loomed over colleagues Doreen and Doris, who passed the time in an obscure department of a large corporation with talk of artificial hips and rubber plants. Both helped to establish Bennett's reputation as one of the most distinctive voices in British theatre.

"Actually, it was Patricia who rang me up and said she was keen to go back and revisit them," says Kemp. "Alan is famously wary about people performing his early work and I have to say he took a little persuading on this one. His concern was that they might be a bit dated.

"I suppose if he was writing Green Forms now it would be about a Bradford call centre being moved to Delhi, but the internal life of offices hasn't changed one bit."

It also adds another level of poignancy, Kemp says, watching Routledge reconceive a role written for a much younger actor. Questions about the age at which we should retire and what work means to our sense of self - questions which the 40-year-old director is currently seeing his own parents grapple with - are brought very much to the fore.

"Someone described Bennett as pitiless and generous'," he says. "There's that cliche of Alan's writing as a cosy Hovis advert but actually he's fantastically unsentimental. Both these plays end quite distressingly - you wonder how it has crept up on you."

Kemp has known Bennett for many years - his father taught the young writer medieval history at Oxford - and worked closely with him on The Madness of George III and The Wind in the Willows at the National Theatre. Does he know if the playwright will be among the audience for Office Suite?

"He has a policy of not going to see his plays after they first get done because he just sits there thinking he ought to be writing something new,"

says Kemp. "But he is going to try to slip in at some point. I think he's kind of intrigued, too."

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