Sunset Across the Bay

In his essay Knocking-off Time, Dave Rolinson notes that Sunset Across the Bay was Bennett's second play for BBC Television.  He notes that this play introduced the themes that were to be come "Bennett territory".

This was Bennett’s second transmitted television play after A Day Out, which had also been directed by Frears and produced by another Bennett regular, Innes Lloyd. Sharing the critical convention that television drama is a writer’s medium, critics have seen in it Bennett’s movement towards ‘genuine Bennett territory’ because he moves from ‘the historian’s distance’ to ‘the observer’s personal proximity’ and anticipates later plays that feature ‘people on the margins being pushed further off the map’ in ‘the landscape of the aging and changing north’ and is ‘the first’ of many ‘Bennett plays about the concerns of the elderly’, which facilitates ‘his gift for investing the outwardly mundane with immense poignancy’.

In addition he notes the contribution made by Stephen Frears and Innes Lloyd to the development of Bennett's work
One of many impressive collaborations between writer Alan Bennett and director Stephen Frears, the play combines understated emotional power and a sense of the social impact of urban planning with a skilful deployment of cinematic technique that builds mood, character and theme.

Dave Rolinson