Plot
It tells the story of Trevor, a teacher of English Literature to adults in the evenings. Trevor is not a happy man; his girlfriend Wendy gets her hair in her muesli, someone has vandalised his visual aids for his evening classes, drawing a large pair of breasts on his poster of Virginia Woolf and a big cigar in the mouth of E. M. Forster on the other; he suffers from 'curate's bladder' and is unable to urinate if there is another man present in the toilet; and he does not even like his name –Trevor – "Did you ever hear of a Trevor Beethoven or Trevor Einstein?" And he always takes a book on buses so he has somewhere to look.
Most of his students are hopeless but there is one bright working-class man in the class. After an unpleasant evening during which he gets punched in the face he meets the bright student, Skinner, by chance. Skinner addresses him as 'Trev' and this cheers him up greatly, making him see himself in a new light.
Reception
Film critic Melvyn Briggs opined that "Alan Bennett has perhaps not gone quite so far as some expected and others may have wished since he went beyond the fringe, but his wit and whimsy are sharply pointed." [1] Paul Taylor wrote in The Independent that "Trevor, the hapless bisexual, is pulled at by all these conflicting forces, his cultural bemusement drolely summed up in the title." [2]
Michael Brooke wrote "although Bennett's own narration is delivered in the third person, anyone familiar with his other works will recognise Trevor Hopkins as a kindred spirit; they will also recognise his constant dilemma — the way doing nothing can be just as meaningful as doing something, and that self-consciousness creates a constant fear of misinterpretation." He went on to state that "despite his dreary sex life with Wendy, Hopkins is clearly not homosexual." [3]
Author Daphne Turner argues that "Bennett's landscape is one of ordinary, disappointing life, people have endurance and resilience and there are small celebrations; Hopkins at the end is about to start a love affair with the cheerful and independent Skinner; interestingly, these small victories are often represented as sexual ones." [4]
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