‘Talking Heads’ Puts Best Foot Forward

Who says talking heads must be tedious?

Hardly that is “Talking Heads 2: Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet,” Alan Bennett’s entertaining, wittily chatty one-woman play that has Patricia Routledge addressing the camera in a monologue that flies across six short acts. She’s the aging, unmarried, utterly earnest Miss Fozzard, struggling to cope while tending her cranky, stroke-impaired brother, Bernard, as her beloved chiropodist, Mr. Dunderdale, tends her feet.

If Miss Fozzard is unremarkable--selling “soft furnishings” in a department store and wondering, “What’s got in to people at work?”--her foot care isn’t. In fact, her life is not as gray and monotonous as it first appears. She reveals this gradually, with almost childlike innocence, while speaking tenderly of her elderly “foot fella,” as Bernard calls him, and his unconventional means of tweaking her toes on a silk handkerchief. Could some footsies be in the works?

Her face an expressive pin cushion, Routledge (“Hetty Wainthropp Investigates”) talks us into Miss Fozzard’s life charmingly and seductively, questioning Bernard’s intimacy with his female physical therapist and almost incidentally issuing hints about Mr. Dunderdale’s unusual preoccupation with feet. In case you were wondering, he believes shoe-laden Imelda Marcos “suffered at the bar of public opinion . . . unjustly.”

The acclaimed Bennett was a member of the ‘60s satirical review “Beyond the Fringe,” with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, and an Oscar nominee for writing the movie based on his play “The Madness of King George”). On display here, in the third of his “Talking Heads” monologues to air on “Masterpiece Theatre,” is his ability to bring magic to the mundane, this time with help from director Patrick Garland and the appealing Routledge.

In its own quiet way, “Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet,” too, is beyond the fringe. And not one fallen arch.

*

* “Masterpiece Theatre’s” “Talking Heads 2: Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet” can be seen Sunday night at 9 on KCET and KVCR. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).