Allelujah!

Playwright: Alan Bennett Director: Nicholas Hytner

Bridge Theatre, Potters Fields Park, London SE1 (0333-320 0051) Until 29 September Running time: 2hrs 35mins (including interval)

★★★

An unintended irony envelops this “sad, sour, clunking and disastrously implausible” little play by Alan Bennett, his first in six years, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. Allelujah! is set on a geriatric ward of “dauntless oldies” at the Bethlehem, a beloved Yorkshire hospital threatened with closure by wicked bureaucrats. The point of Bennett’s “sermon – sorry, play” – is to show how “unforgivable it is to treat the elderly as mere objects”, but Bennett’s play is guilty of doing just that. The old here are “human soapboxes” from which the playwright “harangues us” with his “woefully predictable” opinions on the relative merits of kind-hearted Indian doctors and Daily Mail-reading management consultants. “Oh, dearie, dearie me.”

True, Bennett’s imagined hospital “has all the credibility of a political slogan on the side of a bus”, said Matt Trueman in Variety. Yet Allelujah! is not without virtues. “It can swivel from comedy to poignancy in a flash, bawdy jokes swallowed up by coughing fits.” The turning point is the scene just before the interval, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out, when the play is brought into “unexpectedly clear focus” with the arrival of stern Sister Gilchrist (Deborah Findlay). Until then, the play seems to coast on Bennett’s witty dialogue. But any notion that he is romanticising the NHS is abruptly upended by this “flat-out brilliant – and extremely funny – scene”.

Alas, this is no History Boys, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. But the play’s deficiencies are “far outweighed by the humanity-affirming zest of the thing”. The 84-year-old playwright’s gift for sublime turns of phrase remains in rude health and is “royally served” by the large, top-notch cast. Nicholas Hytner directs with a “marvellous instinct” for Bennett’s “interplay between revue-like whimsy and political subversiveness”. Best of all, said Paul Taylor in The Independent, are the song-and-dance routines that let his “doddery gaggle” show off their inner spirit. They are simply glorious.

CD of the week

Bach: Goldberg Variations, Diego Ares (harpsichord) Harmonia Mundi HMM90228384 £8.92 This charismatic reading by the young Spanish harpsichordist of the Bach masterpiece shows great virtuosity, but it’s “never on display simply for its own sake” (Sunday Times).