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Allelujah – The Bridge Theatre A new play by Alan Bennett is always an event. Bennett, as he says himself, has reached the age (84) where, if you can eat a boiled egg, they think you’re marvellous. Only David Attenborough is as universally admired and, yes, loved. He could probably shoot his grandmother on Piccadilly Circus at high noon and a crowd would gather to help him cross the street. Alan Bennett has written wonderful plays and given us so much and I’m trying hard to avoid calling him a ‘national treasure’. So it seems cruel to point out that Allelujah is not, ahem, his best work. This isn’t 40 Years On nor yet The History Boys, it is not even properly a play, but a rant. And, just like you do when someone you love is banging on about the current state of Arsenal’s defence or the lack of parking at the supermarket, you tune out, even when you agree with every word. That’s Allelujah, a heartfelt two-hour rant about the NHS, the shuttering of local hospitals, and the disgraceful care offered to the elderly in our country. It’s all Margaret Thatcher’s fault, Bennett and his characters tell us repeatedly. And it is. But she’s dead and so now are the arguments put forward here. They shouldn’t be, we agree, but they are. The words ‘flogging’ and ‘dead horse’ come unpleasantly to mind. Director Nicholas Hytner has assembled his usual miraculous lineup of actors to do him proud. Every elderly actor in Britain seems to be on that stage, each displaying their considerable individual talents and combining in an ensemble able to disarm us with their dramatic skills but also with their abilities to put over the songs and dances with which the play interrupts itself all too often. Set in the geriatric ward of a Yorkshire hospital threatened with closure, an idealistic young Indian doctor, a gormless orderly, and Nurse Ratched Mark Two (if you don’t know what I’m talking about you’re too young to be reading this column) toil to keep an endless supply of oldies alive. Among the villains is the hospital’s chairman, obsessed with his television image, and a thrusting civil servant, keen to shut the hospital down for furtherance of his own career. It’s all a bit formulaic, a bit too obvious, although there are some trademark Bennett jokes to keep you going and a sort of unexpected plot twist which comes far too late to do the play much good. When things flag, or the ‘state of England’ rears its head yet again, all the oldies get up and dance. The acting, as you would expect in a Hytner production in which Deborah Findlay, Simon Williams and Samuel Barnett participate, is first rate. In a programme note which is every bit as entertaining as Allelujah, is Bennett’s credo about his own place in the playwrighting scheme of things, “If not quite a platform, a play is certainly a plinth, a small eminence from which to address the world, hold forth about one’s concerns or the concerns of one’s characters. But not to preach.” In Allelujah, though, he’s preaching to the choir. As You Like It – Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park Where better to be on a warm summer evening than watching a Shakespeare comedy amid the leafy splendours of Regent’s Park? Nowhere, that’s where. I was a little alarmed at the start, though, when the rock music was loud and the stage strewn with garbage. It turns out that the director was making a point which, of course, I missed, that our modern world is stuffed with rubbish and the only escape, according to an extensive programme note, is to make for the Forest of Arden in the shape of an ecovillage. By the beginning of the second half, the rubbish-strewn set had been replaced with flowers and deckchairs and order had been restored. We were, presumably, relocated in an ecovillage where everybody (or nearly everybody) is lovely to everybody else and four sets of lovers eventually get together in the right order. Max Webster’s production is modern dress so there’s the usual awkwardness about what to do about swords, etc, but that’s minor. Edward Hogg is a bit weedy for Orlando but Maureen Beattie is a splendid Jacques and in among the general ecological loviness of the production she/he manages to convey real outrage at the killing of the stag. Olivia Vinall is a lightweight Rosalind – all right, she’s no Vanessa Redgrave – but there are compensations from every part of the young cast, particularly in the singing of Me’sha Bryan and Jacade Simpson, both new to me. Music and song are unusually integrated into this production, not as interruptions, but as integral and necessary ways of telling the story and the ragtag band of on-stage and pit musicians do the job well. This As You like It is fun, once you get past the political statements of the garbage and social inequality, and it’s just the thing for a summer evening. Two for the Seesaw – Trafalgar Studios William Gibson’s 1968 two-hander is having a smart little revival in the tiny studio at Trafalgar Studios and it’s worth seeing for its two actors – Charles Dorfman and Elsie Bennett – and for its theme, the evergreen relationship issue of commitment. If you want reassurance that nothing has progressed on the sexual battlefield since 1968, look no further. Jerry has just left his wife and is lonely in New York. Gittel is a flaky career girl without much of a career. They meet in a bar and try, oh how they try, to make a couple out of their separate insecurities. Naturally, when one is ready to commit, the other isn’t. For most couples, that strikes chords. Gibson is a real playwright. He won a Tony and an Oscar for The Miracle Worker, and his Golda’s Balcony became the longest running play on Broadway so he certainly knew how to support Jerry and Gittel through the vagaries of their fractured efforts to love one another. The original cast for Two for the Seesaw was Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft. They were apparently equally as unable to commit to each other as these two, fifty years later. Pity – Royal Court Theatre Think Spike Milligan crossed with Bertolt Brecht. Pity is very noisy. It’s like a grown up video game in which everybody is always getting blown up or shot and killed and falling down and then getting up and becoming someone else. Death is apparently temporary in Rory Mallarkey’s absurdist rant. Wars, bombs and terrorism are the metaphors for a peaceful English small town. At least, I think they are. Or possibly the English small town is a metaphor for wars, bombs and terrorism. After a while, it doesn’t seem to matter. The director, Sam Pritchard, manages his large cast expertly, moving them on and off while things blow up around them. There are 9 actors playing 33 parts, plus five members of the Fulham Brass Band”. There are some good jokes, visual and verbal, they sing, dance, and move rhythmically. They don’t have names or characters and, as the playwright helpfully notes in the programme, they are “A big mixed group that represents the world”. Oh, right then. Maybe in another universe, if the audience is really, really, concentrating, some of it makes sense. Like Brecht. Like Milligan. Alkaline – Park Theatre The performances rescue Alkaline from itself. Without carefully nuanced performances from EJ Martin as Sophie, an unhappy young woman planning her wedding who wants her best friend to remove her hijab so that all her bridesmaids will ‘match,’ and Claire Cartwright as Sarah, the recent convert to Islam who has found the peace she sought in her religion, there wouldn’t be much there. Nitin Kundra, as Sarah’s boyfriend, does a good job of conveying the difficulties of trying to live within two cultures and Sophie’s fiance (Alan Mahon), just wants another drink. This slight piece, trying to be achingly relevant, recites the fissures these old friends encounter as they try to remain close despite this enormous change in their relationship. We have all experienced growing apart from people who were once very close. Sometimes the friendships can be mended, sometimes not, and so it is with these urban young women and their men. Afterthought.
London is blessed with several beautiful new theatres. How lucky we are that the theatre in London is still so vibrant that there is space and desire for more buildings to house it. I went to two this week alone. What struck me was that these beautiful spaces have been built only for the fit and healthy with hardly a thought for the demographic of theatre audiences which thankfully, still encompasses all ages with a slight emphasis on the over-40s. The Park, which houses Alkaline is reached via a tube station, Finsbury Park, with dozens of stairs linking the platform to the Way Out. Having negotiated the stairs, there is then a circuitous walk to the exit which is at the back of the station. There is in fact an exit which opens onto the very street where the theatre is located but it has been closed off, necessitating a long walk around the streets and through a tunnel under a bridge where many unfortunate homeless people and beggars live, then though a bus terminus and down the street to the theatre. In the rain this is no fun. It’s not much fun when it isn’t raining, either, and it’s a nightmare for the elderly and the disabled. The signage in the theatre itself isn’t very helpful and, without an usher to help, it’s difficult to know which of the two performing spaces contains the play you want to see. Lots of stairs and I’ve twice gone up and down looking for the right one. The new Bridge Theatre where I saw Allelujah is in the shadow of Tower Bridge and is a poem of wood and curves. Just stunning. The seats and sightlines are better than any of the traditional Frank Matcham-designed theatres in the West and East End. Once you get there, that is. The closest tube station is London Bridge, a good 15 minutes’ walk away. Too far for those on crutches or sticks, and once you’ve arrived there aren’t enough of the elegant chairs and tables to accommodate those who need to sit after such a long walk before attempting the long staircase giving access to the auditorium. Teething troubles. If enough theatregoers point out these shortcomings to the theatres’ managers and producers, the chances are they’ll be addressed, so don’t suffer in silence. At the very least they can open the tube exit to the Park Theatre, and put up some signs. They can also install a shuttle bus between London Bridge station and the Bridge Theatre and buy a few more chairs. These fine buildings will be with us forever, expanding Londoners’ amazing access to theatre. It would be grand if they were just a little more user-friendly.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
March 2024
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