Bennett’s tired old gags need radical surgery
FOR a man so bogged by nostalgia, Alan Bennett has written a surprisingly topical play – you almost sense it is reluctantly topical – about an NHS hospital where geriatric patients are hastened to their deaths.
Mr Bennett does not mention the Liverpool ‘care pathway’, that awful euphemism for withdrawing treatment from the old, and he must have started writing this work before the recent inquiry into Gosport War Memorial Hospital, where 450 elderly patients were given opioid drugs they did not need. But Allelujah! strays on to this territory.
The setting is a hospital near the Pennines where old folk keep cheerful by singing songs from the 1930s and 40s (On the Sunny Side of the Street; A, You’re Adorable, etc).
Welcome to Bennett world, that Kodak Instamatic snapshot shire where aunties wear Liquorice Allsorts hats and every line seems written for a wheedling Leeds accent. Old voices warbling wartime songs? A perfect fit. One of my games in Bennett is to await the mention of Timothy Whites chemist and houseware stores. Kerching. There it comes in the slow first half, bang on schedule.
Shortly before the interval, after wearisome construction of the various ‘characters’ in the hospital’s Dusty Springfield ward and Joan Collins ward – yes, we get the idea, Alan – there comes a memorable scene. A newly-arrived patient is given unauthorised treatment by unmarried ward Sister Gilchrist (excellent Deborah Findlay). That is the first moment the play sparks. The large cast of oldies includes Simon Williams, Julia Foster and Gwen Taylor. Much of the plot in-fill falls to Jeff Rawle as a stroppy ex-miner whose son is a cold-hearted London political adviser.
Peter Forbes plays the hospital’s blustering chairman who, inevitably (for this is Bennett), wears a pinstripe suit.
The dishonesty of that cliché encapsulates the weakness of Bennett. Why not tell the truth about modern hospital managers and their ghastly, patronising egalitarianism?
What a play this could have been had it lasered in on ethical dilemmas and misjudgements in geriatric care. Mr Bennett is, after all, an accessible voice.
He is a vocal supporter of our socialist health system. He could have knocked the stuffing out of us with a searing, trenchant tragi-comedy.
Instead he falls back too often on tired riffs about genteel old Northern ladies called Mavis and Hazel.
Like a bored souk vendor flogging the same old rugs, he rolls out jokes about Yorkshire conurbations (‘ I did hear a cuckoo once but that was over towards Harrogate where you could understand it’). There are the usual ancient moans about Margaret Thatcher and the miners’ strike.
Could Sir Nicholas Hytner, the director here, not have pointed out to him that high Thatcherism was more than 30 years ago, before many of today’s theatregoers were born?
Allelujah! makes for a mildly amusing evening. But any electric charge we might have felt from the topicality of the plot is sacrificed to Mr Bennett’s artistic laziness.