The best of British for Bennett’s black comedy

NATIONAL treasures Dame Judi Dench and Sir Derek Jacobi will star in a new film based on a play by another legend, Alan Bennett.

The playwright’s last work, hospital drama Allelujah!, has been adapted by Heidi Thomas, creator of the BBC’s awardwinning period drama Call The Midwife.

Thomas, the brains behind the BBC1 series set in an East London convent, has opened up Bennett’s acerbic, politically subversive piece (almost a black comedy) set in the geriatric ward of a Yorkshire hospital, the Bethlehem, which is threatened with closure.

It was staged at the Bridge Theatre three years ago, with Nicholas Hytner directing a company that included Deborah Findlay, Julia Foster, Simon Williams and Nicola Hughes.

JENNIFER SAuNDERS and Julia McKenzie will also star in the film, which is in pre-production. Dame Judi will play a former librarian, who is now a patient on the hospital’s Dusty Springfield ward.

Dench, by the way, is a member of the ensemble cast of Kenneth Branagh’s new film Belfast, set in his hometown in 1969. It’s going to the London Film Festival next month and has already been hailed as one of the year’s best pictures (and rightly so!).

Jacobi will take on the part of another patient — a former headmaster. While Saunders, who is now appearing as Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit at the Harold Pinter Theatre, is in negotiations to play a ward sister obsessed with the bladder control (or lack thereof) of her charges.

McKenzie, who has played Miss Marple on TV and is an award-winning stage artist, will play a one-time child soprano, who once gloried in the name ‘the Pudsey Nightingale’.

She has been admitted to the crumbling institution with an ankle injury. It seems appropriate for McKenzie to be playing a singer; some of her most famous roles have been in musicals, such as Follies and Sweeney Todd.

Call The Midwife’s Thomas knows her way around the world of medicine, having steered the BBC’s ratings winner through ten seasons — its 11th will start next year following a Christmas special.

I’m told she has added a coda in her screenplay that acknowledges the coronavirus pandemic. Casting continues on the other key roles.