Ex. 1 Read the text. All of Alan Bennett’s play “People” takes place in a grand room of a stately English home that’s crumbling around its inhabitants

All of Alan Bennett’s play “People” takes place in a grand room of a stately English home that’s crumbling around its inhabitants.

The play, a typically bittersweet comedy by Bennett, is on at the National Theater in London, and will be shown Wednesday at Gorizont cinema.

It features a cast of famous British actors: Frances de la Tour plays Dorothy, an aristocratic former model who doesn’t want to give up the house, despite the leaks. Selina Cadell plays her sister, a vicar, who is eager for the house to be taken over by the Concern, an organization based on the National Trust, a British conservation fund that restores and preserves stately homes.

The play takes on the preservation industry and its Disneyfication of history – and suggests sometimes it’s better to just let things fall apart.

At one point in “People,” there is a discussion about the stately home’s collection of aging chamber pots.

Not that the play is an all-out attack on conservation organizations.

The short trip was Cadell’s first to Russia since the early 1970s – an awful trip, she said, marred by corrupt tour guides who hid them from the public. Cadell, though, crept off from the tour to local cafes.

Later in the trip, Cadell was in a cafe in the Bolshoi, eager for some vitamin C after ten days with barely a sight of fruit. She asked in vain for an orange at the cafe counter.

“A woman came up to us dressed in black and started talking to us in Russian,” she said, “Seconds later she produced two oranges out of her bag and she gave them to us. I kept on going ‘no, no,’ she kept on going ‘yes, yes.’ She said, ‘tell your friends when you got home that a Russian lady gave you an orange.’ I offered her biros, she didn’t want biros.”

Cadell was staying at the Marriott Aurora, an ostentatious hotel full of marble, she said, a world away from the “prison cell” she occupied at the Intourist back in the 1970s, but about as real as a National Trust home.

Cadell then went to check out the statue of Anton Chekhov at the end of Kamergersky Pereulok. She has performed in Chekhov plays a number of times, including in an acclaimed Sam Mendes production on Broadway.

“Do you think I could find a postcard of the statue?” she asked. A marble Chekhov, yes; a postcard, not a chance.