Allelujah! Bennett’s still on top form at 83
Alan Bennett has a surprise for those who thought he’d written his last work for the stage: he’s penned a new play.
‘His response to old age is to go on writing plays — that’s a pretty good response,’ said director nicholas Hytner of his most frequent collaborator.
the 83-year- old dramatist has written allelujah!, set in the Dusty Springfield geriatric ward of a local hospital on the edge of the Pennines in West Yorkshire.
Hytner called allelujah! ‘very funny, very touching, and quite alarming’.
It will begin performances on July 11 at the Bridge: the new powerhouse theatre established on the south side of tower Bridge by Hytner and business partner nick Starr who, until three years ago, ran the national theatre together for more than a decade.
Current Bridge production Julius Caesar has become one of the most talked about plays of the year so far.
Hytner, who has worked with Bennett on seven plays and three films, including the History Boys and the lady In the Van, told me he was full of admiration for Bennett. ‘It’s a remarkable thing, his career,’ he observed, pointing out that Bennett found fame in 1960 when he co-wrote and performed in Beyond the Fringe.
‘the Fringe is now an ancient cultural touchstone; and the same guy who was there doing Beyond the Fringe still writes urgent plays that people need to see.’
He added: ‘I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that he himself is over 80, but more to the point he, like so many people, has lived through his parents’ extreme old age.’
HYtner
said Bennett’s new play reflects ‘ pretty accurately the diverse array of characters you would find’ when visiting or working in the old-fashioned, cradle-to-the-grave hospital.
and Bennett has plenty of experience with hospitals. He wrote in one of his collection of diaries that he longed to remove his mother from the ‘yelling hellhole’ of a care home she’d been in. and when he was being treated for cancer 20 years ago (he got the all-clear long ago) he used both private and nHS hospitals but said the nHS had ‘more jokes’.
Hytner said he imagined every director must dream of having a collaboration with a playwright which goes on for decades (he first worked with Bennett in 1989 on his adaptation of the Wind In the Willows, which opened at the national in 1990).
‘I’m always the first person to read alan’s plays. and I guess that’s what every director wants: to be the first director who reads a great playwright’s plays, and who is that playwright’s constant first choice.’
Bennett, for his part, has said that Hytner gets the balance of encouragement versus criticism exactly right when bringing a new work to the stage.
the director agreed that Bennett ‘ does like to be told that it’s worth persevering; but
doesn’t like to be told that it’s all marvellous’. There are some playwrights, he added, who have ‘done all the work by the time you read the play’. Like Martin McDonagh , whose new work, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, will run at The Bridge from October 10. McDonagh’s film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri won two best picture trophies, and three other honours at last Sunday’s Bafta ceremony. Hytner said McDonagh’s plays are ‘watertight by the time he lets anybody read them; whereas a lot of playghts wrights — Alan’s amongst them - want to hand over a first draft to see where somebody else thinks the play is going. 'It’s not that one is better than the other. It’s just that the journeys to get to the first permance are different.’