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.
