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Post by kathryn on Aug 30, 2018 17:34:56 GMT
I’ve not noticed any difference between the Bridge audience and the NT audience. I’d be very surprised if the Bridge has managed to attract an audience that hasn’t been to the Nash.....
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Post by n1david on Aug 30, 2018 19:14:00 GMT
I’ve not noticed any difference between the Bridge audience and the NT audience. I’d be very surprised if the Bridge has managed to attract an audience that hasn’t been to the Nash..... It’s an Alan Bennett play directed by Nick Hytner, so I suspect it’s getting *exactly* the same type of audience this would have got in the NT. Generally speaking I think it’s too early to say what the Bridge audience is, for Julius Caesar (at least in the pit) it was much younger and more diverse, whereas Young Marx was, again, a fairly NT audience. For Nightfall the whole audience seemed rather unsure what they were doing there.
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Post by wickedgrin on Aug 30, 2018 19:44:01 GMT
I thought the audience was very posh the night I went. They made me feel like a real poor pleb ….. oh wait a minute I am a poor pleb!
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Post by kathryn on Aug 30, 2018 20:22:43 GMT
I’ve not noticed any difference between the Bridge audience and the NT audience. I’d be very surprised if the Bridge has managed to attract an audience that hasn’t been to the Nash..... It’s an Alan Bennett play directed by Nick Hytner, so I suspect it’s getting *exactly* the same type of audience this would have got in the NT. Generally speaking I think it’s too early to say what the Bridge audience is, for Julius Caesar (at least in the pit) it was much younger and more diverse, whereas Young Marx was, again, a fairly NT audience. For Nightfall the whole audience seemed rather unsure what they were doing there. I’ve seen young and diverse audiences at the Nash too, though - just not at Alan Bennett plays!
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Post by showgirl on Aug 31, 2018 4:04:17 GMT
I've felt the same at both venues, which is a bit overlooked and not taken into account by planners/management because I'm on my own - so mainly issues like not being able to get a table if I want to eat at the NT cafe because you have to queue first, then take your chance getting a seat; finding in the Bridge foyer that all tables are occupied by couples/groups etc. I'd love theatres to be more welcoming both to solo visitors and to those who wish or need to sit down in the foyer. That said, the NT is good for having seating scattered about and the Bridge does have a relatively spacious foyer too so a case of arriving early enough - or sitting outside if the weather allows.
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Post by sf on Aug 31, 2018 14:05:26 GMT
I’ve not noticed any difference between the Bridge audience and the NT audience. I’d be very surprised if the Bridge has managed to attract an audience that hasn’t been to the Nash..... It’s an Alan Bennett play directed by Nick Hytner, so I suspect it’s getting *exactly* the same type of audience this would have got in the NT. Generally speaking I think it’s too early to say what the Bridge audience is, for Julius Caesar (at least in the pit) it was much younger and more diverse, whereas Young Marx was, again, a fairly NT audience. For Nightfall the whole audience seemed rather unsure what they were doing there.
I'd say the audience for 'My Name is Lucy Barton' - the best thing I've seen so far this year, including 'The Inheritance' - was, yes, a fairly NT audience too, albeit a bit younger than the audience for 'Allelujah' the other week.
That could be because I saw '...Lucy Barton' on a Saturday and 'Allelujah' on a Wednesday afternoon, though, and weekday matinee audiences skew older.
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Post by lynette on Aug 31, 2018 16:44:28 GMT
The thing is, what is young? If I see anyone under 40 at the NT I’m delighted. Mostly such 'young' people are with their parents. I know, only anecdotal evidence but it looks mostly that mum in law got the tix. Actual young people, say 20-30..very rare. To be honest people work late now so even a 7.30 is too early, what with having to eat something at some point, not to mention babysitters. Other young people in the Cafe say are loaded with back packs and stuff and don’t necessarily go into the Theatre, do they? I often think they should do more in the foyers.....putting on playlets I mean. Like when they offer you a taste of someat in the supermarket. Do they still do that?
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Post by kathryn on Aug 31, 2018 21:25:23 GMT
The thing is, what is young? If I see anyone under 40 at the NT I’m delighted. Mostly such 'young' people are with their parents. I know, only anecdotal evidence but it looks mostly that mum in law got the tix. Actual young people, say 20-30..very rare. To be honest people work late now so even a 7.30 is too early, what with having to eat something at some point, not to mention babysitters. Other young people in the Cafe say are loaded with back packs and stuff and don’t necessarily go into the Theatre, do they? I often think they should do more in the foyers.....putting on playlets I mean. Like when they offer you a taste of someat in the supermarket. Do they still do that? You know, some of us here are still under 40! My friend with the NT membership only just turned 40 and we’ve been going to the NT together for years! Certainly since before I was 30. I have a work friend who takes her kids to the Christmas show every year. So do not despair - there are young ‘uns around from time to time.
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Post by showgirl on Sept 1, 2018 4:29:26 GMT
If the NT were to bring back foyer music there would still need to be a music-free area (might be difficult with the open-plan layout) and also, PLEASE not always blasted jazz! I will say again that I had to assume only jazz musicians would play free as it was all there ever was and I loathed, and loathe it. (For those who do like it, imagine a constant bombardment with a different genre that you dislike. I'd prefer silence but if there has to be background noise, ring the changes for goodness' sake.)
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Post by lynette on Sept 1, 2018 13:10:50 GMT
Sorry, prob my fault but we have moved away from subject of thread. The beautiful space in front of the Bridge would be nice for a bit of cabaret, no? Do you know if they opened up the doors when it was really hot?
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Post by alicechallice on Sept 1, 2018 23:41:25 GMT
Put me in the thoroughly enjoyed camp for this one. Very much liked the light-hearted parts mixed in with the darker elements and didn't mind the lecturing of the audience as Bennett's opinion is one I value.
Overheard a couple complaining that he was trying to cover too many themes in one play, which my companion agreed with. I have to confess that isn't something that bothers me that much as I always like a melting pot of ideas, regardless of whether it all gets tied up in the end.
Liked more than People but not as much as The Habit of Art.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 2, 2018 11:07:23 GMT
Went in to this with low expectations but I thought it was great. Probably helps that I've had to deal with navigating the care system, about which I think it was pretty accurate. Anyway, I enjoyed this more than anything from Bennett since The History Boys.
£20 stalls rush seats from TodayTix were great value - good on The Bridge for keeping prime seats for these despite the show selling very well (certainly the matinee yesterday seemed to be full).
Was amused by what I can only describe as a prime chunk of apoplectic gammon who was ranting at his family (who looked on in silence) in the foyer at the end of the play. Not sure which particular aspect he was objecting to.
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Post by alicechallice on Sept 2, 2018 14:14:57 GMT
Went in to this with low expectations but I thought it was great. Probably helps that I've had to deal with navigating the care system, about which I think it was pretty accurate. Anyway, I enjoyed this more than anything from Bennett since The History Boys. £20 stalls rush seats from TodayTix were great value - good on The Bridge for keeping prime seats for these despite the show selling very well (certainly the matinee yesterday seemed to be full). Was amused by what I can only describe as a prime chunk of apoplectic gammon who was ranting at his family (who looked on in silence) in the foyer at the end of the play. Not sure which particular aspect he was objecting to. Were you there in the evening? If so, which one were you?
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Post by Deleted on Sept 2, 2018 14:29:10 GMT
No, I was at the matinee
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Post by alicechallice on Sept 2, 2018 15:52:23 GMT
Bums. Was hoping you were the hottie sat one along from me.
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Post by stevemar on Sept 2, 2018 17:39:21 GMT
This was all rather lazy and disappointing. However, as my expectations had been sufficiently lowered by comments on the board, I actually quite enjoyed this from the front row (price lowered after I originally booked it).
Yes, there was a lot thrown in, and the audience lapped it up. I quite liked the twist, and even the song and dance numbers were poignant. The acting was fine, and Sasha Dhawan is my new favourite.
As for the audience. 99.9% Caucausian (except me) as I would expect. Some youngsters with their parents. No where near as diverse as Julius Caesar, so I think it is all about the play as to whom the Bridge attracts, but obviously a big leg up from the “inherited” audiences from the National.
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Post by tmesis on Sept 2, 2018 19:50:30 GMT
I enjoyed this but it really isn't vintage Bennett. The first act is very funny but almost too broad-brush. It was almost like Carry on Nurse; you half expected Kenneth Williams to come on camping it up with a bit of 'Oh Matron!' The plot twist at the end of act one was annoying and totally unbelievable. The end was then extremely clunky with the main characters directly addressing the audience in a proselytising manner that jarred with the rest of the play.
I actually liked the song and dance and it was a great cast.
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Post by tmesis on Sept 2, 2018 19:54:33 GMT
This was all rather lazy and disappointing. However, as my expectations had been sufficiently lowered by comments on the board, I actually quite enjoyed this from the front row (price lowered after I originally booked it). Yes, there was a lot thrown in, and the audience lapped it up. I quite liked the twist, and even the song and dance numbers were poignant. The acting was fine, and Sasha Dhawan is my new favourite. As for the audience. 99.9% Caucausian (except me) as I would expect. Some youngsters with their parents. No where near as diverse as Julius Caesar, so I think it is all about the play as to whom the Bridge attracts, but obviously a big leg up from the “inherited” audiences from the National. I was at yesterday's matinee and the audience felt very 'Chichester.'
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Post by stefy69 on Sept 6, 2018 6:45:44 GMT
Saw this yesterday and well I enjoyed it but not brillant, some very funny bits but overall O K , as an aside though loved the Bridge Theatre and the seating is fab.
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Post by dontdreamit on Sept 6, 2018 8:49:27 GMT
I have a ticket for sale to the final of this on the noticceboard, if anyone’s interested.
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Post by joem on Sept 8, 2018 21:52:17 GMT
Despite the criticisms, for me this was better than Bennett's previous two plays. Maybe the targets were obvious, maybe some of the jokes were a little rusty, maybe a little slack might be cut for a guy who is now eighty-four and still writes better than most of the competition and who has given us so much pleasure over the years?
You'll miss him when he's gone.
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Post by Latecomer on Sept 9, 2018 8:35:48 GMT
I thought this was terrible. It is hard to describe how bad I thought this was. It is also hard to hear the things people laugh at.....
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 9, 2018 11:20:10 GMT
Waiting for the Telegram saw Alan Bennett perfectly prod at, yet praise, the worst and best of hospitals and their care of the elderly – the paradox that a place of healing is also a church of death. In Waiting for the Telegram (way ahead of its time), dying young and living old sit side by side, both an unimaginable hell, yet the kindnesses in these hospital buildings is unimaginably optimistic. This might be Bennett’s best Talking Head and one of Bennett’s very best works. Thirty years on, Allelujah! is that piece’s spiritual sequel, and sees Alan Bennett back on form – almost.
The Trotsky of Betty’s Tea Shop, as ‘Alan Bennett’ has become via his self-serialisation, has never quite written a play like this – overtly this political; thematically this morbid. Ten years after his masterpiece, the complex and conflicting The Habit of Art, and six years after People, an old man ranting at country houses but with a Tour De La Force performance, this mixes Bennett’s new, angry, political persona as cultivated via the LRB, and the sadistic masochistic Bennett, best seen years ago when Bennett’s cosy British institutions were intruded by a penis-obsessed Kafka and a penis-obsessed Joe Orton – two of Bennett’s bona fide masterpieces. The end result here? Gleeful, ridiculous, exciting, misguided, all over the place, a mess, a treat.
“We’re going to the judgement day”. Allelujah! is about death. Sadistically so. Had Derek and Clive written Here We Go, here we’d be – the awful reality of needing your nappy changed, losing your mental functions, albeit here with knob jokes. It’s as if the Reaper turns up in the living room, like Kafka did, out-of-place and ill-at-ease; Bennett brings the profound into the cosy, as he does at his best, brutally so. What Allelujah! captures best is that series of paradoxical emotions we all hold about hospitals – to love the NHS but hate hospitals, to want a great hospital but never want to go there. With the geriatric ward in his crosshairs, Bennett asked the profound question “How can we feel passionate towards a house of death?”. From Intensive Care to Talking Heads to especially the last scenes of Cocktail Sticks, Bennett’s always loved hospitals, but never liked them – and Allelujah! continues this. What do creature comforts matter, when they’re VERY temporary? How is success measured, quality or quantity of death? What is a good death – is death, ever, good? Bennett juxtaposed song-and-dance with immobility – it’s bleak. Bennett has onstage self-defecation and lots of it – it’s bleak. Bennett creates a community choir but argues that hell is other people – it’s bleak. As a study of death, this was absolutely nihilistic. Never has Bennett been as unsentimental as this – and by being so chirpy, it’s amongst the darkest humour he’s ever written. It’s a privilege to watch.
But of course it is a political piece too. The political ‘Alan Bennett’ of the diaries since 1988’s The Lady in the Van is as much a character as, say, Auden or Kafka or (perhaps the most fair comparison) Miss Shepherd herself – but despite subverting national subjects I’ve felt a certain reticence to stage politics. Suddenly, not. Bennett’s anti-austerity drum-banging is wonderfully on the nose, and Bennett clearly loves the NHS despite its faults. That Bennett all-but spells out his targets, esp. cuts and target-meeting, and pulls no punches is joyous to watch. I admired Bennett for managing to criticise the notion of the geriatric ward’s tweeness whilst literally singing its praises. I also always love it when he’s unsubtle with his criticism.
Via the Samuel Barnett and Jeff Rawle characters, I felt Bennett’s interest in the local was explored too – what is community? Bennett’s hasn’t really written about a northern community in theatre in years – but by presenting an aging community and the next generation, here I was haunted by questions of where you live and with whom you die. Bennett’s presented lifelong communities before, and here takes them to the end – whilst, in the Barnett character, asking whether Rawle’s desperation to call one place home is better than Barnett’s exact opposite.
Had this wrapped up five minutes before the interval I think the wool would’ve been pulled over my eyes and I’d wholly have loved it as cynical sketch satire, even his most fantastically cynical since Kafka’s Dick. My main issue, ultimately, is structurally – with ‘the twist’ that ends Act One. There’s a great polemical farce to be written, Arsenic and Old Lace meets Peter Nichols, about murdering patients to meet targets – had this been the Act One twist in a four act play, we would have had time to explore it proper (both plot-wise and politically). Withheld until the curtain, this comic exaggeration – about which I think Bennett has more to say – end up rushed and overloaded in the final interrogation, interesting but underdeveloped. Up until then his focus has been simpler – NHS, home, death – and there’s enough to be said in simple NHS love, Tory bashing, and nihilistic glee. Adding “Sister Killer” sooner would have mined more comic potential and explored the theme of euthanasia in sickening yet satirical detail, but adding it so late felt… forced, rushed. It’s a sign of the play’s sketchiness – too many dramatic arcs are sacrificed for five-minute funny ones, and this sinister idea deserves more than that.
Stylistically, Bennett himself called it a revue, and its sketches are its blessing and curse. In its bleak singalongs I sensed the ghosts of Lindsay Anderson and Joan Littlewood haunting this – serious politics made fun of via song. It harked back to his old collaborator Anderson, and look at how Anderson himself portrayed hospitals. I laughed at the dances, I winced at the medical moments, I marvelled at the politics – but I did all this with Beyond the Fringe which is just sketches not a story; I don’t think this was that coherent a play. Is that a problem? Yes and no – perhaps it’s easier to be political, philosophical and comical in short sharp jabs, but it’s harder to have Barnett and Rawle as their opposites, Findlay as the best/worst of ‘efficiency’, the porter as yoof today, or it to really land its political blows, when its best moments are so slight. That said, this revue style makes the death and pooping on stage even more subversive – to gleefully juxtapose gleeful routines with senility and incontinence and dropping dead… It’s a sketchy piece dramatically, but it’s an interesting callback to Bennett’s earlier dramatic lives, and one that works better, I’d argue, in mocking the incontinent than mocking the incompetent (ridiculous dancing to mock the Tory government? Late to the game there Alan).
Also, I uncrossed my arms at his fourth-wall-breaking Brexit-Windrush polemic, but it is embarrassingly on-the-nose and thematically belongs in a different play, politically it fits albeit uncomfortably – I’m quite forgiving of very blunt political speeches in plays (because I’m thick and it’s helpful), just here it felt that Bennett wanted to strike Brexit whilst the iron was hot whether this was the right play or not* – and why not? – but it felt a step to the left of the play’s central, eternal, fatalistic themes (because Brexit isn’t eternal and fatalistic, not at all). *Weirdly, a bit like Smiley in Le Carre’s fascinating last. Not a ridiculous connection – two octogenarian authors underrated in academia down to their genre choices.
(Also, given the way Bennett writes these days – giving Nick Hytner unfinished ideas and working it out together – one wonders quite what Hytner sees, and when Hytner sees them as ready. I’ve praised every idea in this play, just not the structure. Yet The Habit of Art is exquisite. We know it started a muddle (not even a play-within-a-play), yet from that a two-act layered masterpiece emerged. From this, something sketchier than ever emerged, and one wonders whether this is intentional or not. I’d love to know more about his relationship with Frears and Eyre and earlier collaborators)
Oh, and Deborah Findlay can do unshowy like no-one else. Without any actorly mannerisms, whenever she turns up on stage she always bears the life that character’s lived subtly but unmistakably. Yes, Alma had a speech later on to explain herself, but I think we could have guessed her difficult childhood and lifelong service just in how she handled herself. She’s an absolute bloody treasure.
Allelujah! is a bit of a revue, and like all revues some sketches work better than others. However, also, Allelujah! is the brutal, unsentimental work of a radical author, banging his newest drum. Bennett’s actual masterpieces aren’t quite as scattergun, up-and-down, and slightly unstructured as this – think the Pirandellian overlaps and sentimental memorialising of The Habit of Art, the pervy focus that pervades Pr**k Up Your Ears as biography and about biography, or even the self-contained scathing satirical sketches of Beyond the Fringe. But Alan Bennett’s masterpieces also let him let rip, politically, institutionally, philosophically – and thus the unsentimental Allelujah! may be the most characteristically ‘Alan Bennett’ play the great man’s ever written. As a play I wish it had felt more dramatic, coherent, whole. As a political diatribe, it’s on the money but a bit messy. But as a study of death, it’s bleak and bloody brilliant.
Four stars. I’m sentimental, especially when Bennett isn’t.
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Post by peggs on Sept 9, 2018 11:36:51 GMT
I thought this was terrible. It is hard to describe how bad I thought this was. It is also hard to hear the things people laugh at..... Was with Latecomer for this, we've enjoyed disliking the odd play in the past but sadly not here. I don't think I laughed once and found once again that there is little more surprising than what people consider funny, I mean some of the darker twistier moments. I expected to like this, I'd consider myself a Bennett fan but it just seemed too all over the place, too long and not quite sure what it's target was. Did find myself distracted quite effectively by Samuel Barnett's lycra in the first half and Debra Finlay is always great but no not a success for me.
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Post by joem on Sept 9, 2018 19:15:47 GMT
I thought this was terrible. It is hard to describe how bad I thought this was. It is also hard to hear the things people laugh at..... I think it's known as diversity. We are all different, we laugh at different things. I didn't find this hugely funny but there were funny bits. I go with my flow, I don't go to a play determined to like or dislike it and I like bits of plays I dislike and dislike bits of plays I like. Uniformity, monolithic views are not good for me. I don't understand them either or rather I understand that they lead to intolerance and small mindedness. I do not consider myself superior to anyone because I laugh or don't laugh at things others laugh or don't laugh. But neither do I consider myself inferior.
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