Review: Song Trumps Senility in the Angry ‘Allelujah!’

LONDON — The triumphs are never more than temporary. But song repeatedly conquers senility — and rage, fear and helplessness — in “Allelujah!,” the sharp but slow new comedy of dismay by Britain’s most adored octogenarian man of letters, Alan Bennett.

Such melodic victories, performed by the residents of a hospital geriatric ward, often erupt in this eagerly anticipated production, which opened on Wednesday night at the Bridge Theater here. They are a testament to Bennett’s abiding awe for the mystical comforts of music, even in the shadow of death.

The theory that the ability to sing — even dance — can survive the loss of the rational mind is stated early and hopefully in this fulminating play, directed by Bennett’s frequent collaborator, Nicholas Hytner. It’s a notion confirmed by the presence of the first person we see, a decrepit and isolated woman, listing to one side in a spotlighted wheelchair.

Her name is Mrs. Maudsley (Jacqueline Clarke). And long before we learn that she was once known by the irresistibly Bennettian moniker of the Pudsey Nightingale, she trills “Yours,” an undying declaration of love that was a hit for Vera Lynn during World War II.

Bennett, who is 84, shares Mrs. Maudsley’s outrage. Since he is Alan Bennett — the diarist, essayist and writer of peerless comedies like “Single Spies” and “The History Boys” — he is considerably more eloquent in expressing such sentiments.

But there is no denying that, despite its obligatory quota of Bennettian puns and quips, “Allelujah!” is the most openly angry play of this master satirist’s career. Though his portrait of a local cradle-to-grave hospital under threat of extinction has a surfeit of plot strands — including a murder mystery — it is above all a forum for Bennett to rant against his uncaring nation.

His grievances include not only the cynicism of the politicians who oversee health care but also the increasing heartlessness of a country that has no patience or room for immigrants. And Britain’s contradictory clinging to notions of a noble yesteryear even as it erases the evidence of its past. And its culture of self-promotion at the expense of the common good.

Righteous wrath is known to energize theater. (Think of “Look Back in Anger.”) Yet “Allelujah!” often feels oddly phlegmatic, as if sagging under the surfeit of everything it wants to say.

In a much-quoted, mouthwatering description by Hytner, the co-founder and artistic director of the year-old Bridge Theater, he suggested that “Allelujah!” would be an octogenarian “History Boys,” the 2004 play about grammar school students that won Bennett both the Tony and Olivier awards.

After all, this latest offering features not only the same director in Hytner, but also boasts the same ingenious designer, Bob Crowley, and two engaging actors who appeared as mere lads as title characters of “The History Boys” (seen on Broadway in 2006).

They are Samuel Barnett, who plays a conservative management consultant, and Sacha Dhawan, as a young South Asian doctor whose status as a British resident comes under question. Colin, Barnett’s character, is a mass of prickly contradictions: a son of Yorkshire (and a Thatcher-hating coal miner) who has grown up to be an urbane gay Londoner who advises Tory politicians.

His dad, Joe (a very good Jeff Rawle) is a resident of Bethlehem Hospital, the beleaguered, birth-to-death Yorkshire facility, an anachronism that Colin is hoping to help close down. But it will develop that there are other, more direct threats to Joe’s existence, the nature of which I am kept from divulging by the Code of the Spoilers.

Other characters include Sister Gilchrist (the wonderful Deborah Findlay), a no-nonsense nurse with a special distaste for patient-soiled sheets, and Salter (Peter Forbes, late of the spectacular National Theater production of “Follies”), the publicity-courting chairman of the Bethlehem Hospital Trust.

Salter, a former mayor and perpetual politician, is doing his best to publicize the hospital’s plight and has brought in a documentary crew to film the older patients, singing happily in their resident choir. Because this is a work of theater, said patients take to the limelight like old music-hall pros in fantasy sequences that include a sock-hop-costumed rendition of “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” (Arlene Phillips is the choreographer.)

It could be argued that such numbers congest an already incident-thick play. (A subplot involving Findlay’s cleanliness-obsessed nurse could easily be the basis for one of Bennett’s splendid “Talking Heads” monologues.)

But these musical performances offer affecting support for a statement by Dhawan’s character, referring to a discovery made during colon surgery — that there are elements within even the oldest bodies that remain unravaged by time. From his early success “Forty Years On” (1968), Bennett has presented music as a vehicle for transcendence that defies cold analysis.

It’s a subject he explored poignantly in his autobiographical monologue “Hymn,” in which his onstage alter ego spoke of his early exposure to classical music, which made him feel “I had been set free.” He added, “Or as mother would have more prosaically put it, ‘It takes you out of yourself.'”

That’s the very liberation that is bestowed upon the dozen elderly characters who make up the unexpected chorus line of “Allelujah!” And when Rawle’s feeble Joe rises to his feet for a last dance with Findlay’s nurse in the second act, we are reminded anew of the singular mix of generosity and perversity that make Bennett one of the most original and invaluable of playwrights.

“Allelujah!”

Through September 29. Bridge Theater, London.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.