Playwright and all-round northern saint Alan Bennett was and always shall remain middle-aged. In reality of course, he is now an octogenarian, but he pervaded an air of '40-something' in his youth and never quite relieved himself of the habit.As one of England's most beloved playwrights, he is equally at home as a champion for The North, the working classes, the sexually repressed and educated middle classes and the university elite. His mild-mannered Leeds drawl has become synonymous with vicars wives, old-fashioned teachers, the Women's Institute, British Legion, social workers, leftie politics and old ladies who dip their nets and dunk their biscuits. He pervades an air of quaintness, unshowy intellect and corduroy, whilst demonstrating a quite extraordinary gift for observation and barbed wit in the face of frustrating banalities and tedious daily realities.
Perhaps no other writer (save Somerset Maugham) has managed to encapsulate so succinctly, the blistering trivialities of the human condition, so it was with a tinge of disappointment that I left the Bridge Theatre after "ALLELUJAH!" feeling that I had witnessed yet another of Bennett's pleasant but second-tier, late-career efforts. This has taken 6 years to reach us, so perhaps I had (unreasonably?) expected another top flight History Boys or Forty Years On.
We're back up north at a failing Yorkshire hospital where a plethora of thinly drawn geriatric inmates introduce themselves and their various foibles and physical failings. These are interspersed with bouts of gently sung, vaguely familiar, post-war ditties -- presumably designed to imbue scenes with a sprinkling of nostalgia whilst drilling-home the general decrepitude of the generation being paraded before us. Also, I suspect, these moments are a neat device which enables the stage crew to whip on and off the various hospital paraphernalia required to support the story.
Through his play, Bennett, as is his wont, engages in a gentle crusading rant about division, haves and have nots, London meddling in regional affairs, the wholesale collapse of the caring society and specifically the NHS on whose shoulders much social care depends. But it's not all blue rinses and colostomy bags. He juxtaposes the frail old biddies with an impatient camera crew who are ostensibly set to make a documentary about the old-fashioned but vital local hospital when they stumble across a more sensational story. This twist at the end of the first half sets the tone for the denouement in the second half, but on the way, the results are often patchy and even as incoherent as some of the patients. Incoherent is perhaps overstating a general lack of clear structure (which seems extraordinary for a writer as meticulous as Bennett), so perhaps we should generously assume he meant to incorporate a vague nod at Alzheimers and dementia! Whatever the reality, it all seems to sit rather appropriately and makes those moments of impatience displayed by the younger characters even more poignant. The cast is populated with seasoned old timers like Simon Williams, Jeff Rawle, Gwen Taylor. Sue Wallace and Anna Lindup among others, who each make the most of their moments.
Colin who comes to visit his inmate father, is a assertive, harsh (and possibly emotionally damaged) boy-made-good civil servant played by Samuel Barnett. Both he and Ward Sister Gilchrist played by Deborah Findlay, add layers outside of the run-of-the-mill inmate yarns which refresh the plot-line (such as it is) and lead the audience to the darker, harsher revelations which lend an Ealing Comedy edginess to proceedings in the latter half.
Nicholas Hytner directs the busy stage which has benefited from some choreographic input from Arlene Phillips, and Bob Crowley provides the neatly designed hospital green sets with their, wheelchairs, beds and perpetually sliding corridor walls, so that nothing ever visually stagnates.
In 1968 American playwright Mart Crowley secured his place in theatre and LGBT history with his ground breaking work THE BOYS IN THE BAND, the world’s first commercially successful play with openly gay characters. In this seminal work a group of men gather for a party and drink a lot, and say viscous things to each other (as we sometimes do). This is a later play, from 1993.