The film will premiere as a special presentation at the Toronto Film Festival.

Nicholas Hytner's adaption of this tale of the cantankerous Miss Shepherd, who lived in a derelict van in Alan Bennett's driveway for fifteen years, will forever be definitive version of events, says David Sexton. The arrangements people have! The Lady in the Van is the now absurdly famous story of how a cantankerous, ungrateful, bigoted, smelly old bag called Miss Shepherd was allowed to live in a derelict van in Alan Bennett's driveway in increasingly posh Gloucester Crescent, NW1, for 15 years, prevailing upon him to do her shopping and clean up her shit. 

Bennett's original motives may have been common human kindness, liberal guilt, the scent of good copy or raw fascination with obstreperous old ladies. Whatever the reason, it was a bargain: he extracted from this nuisance first many diary entries, then a more extended book, then successful stage and radio plays, and now a movie, directed once more by Nicholas Hytner, until recently the director of the National Theatre, the director of all Bennett's plays for the last 15 years, also behind the films of The Madness of King George and The History Boys.

Introducing the film in Toronto, Hytner emphasized that it was filmed in the very street, in the very house, in the unchanged rooms, where it happened: it's the authorized version. Alex Jennings does his excellent impersonation of Alan Bennett twice over, as Alan the writer and Alan the man, conversing sarcastically with one another in the same room, a stage device that feels a little indulgent on screen, almost reminiscent of Tom Hardy being both Krays or Jeremy Irons twin crazy gynaecologists.