• Allelujah! (National Theatre Live) 

7/20/19 (Sat), Tokyo

An underwhelming critique of the UK’s national health system (NHS) by the estimable Alan Bennett, directed by his History Boys partner Nicholas Hytner and filmed in performance at London’s Bridge Theatre. The geriatric ward of a large hospital in northern England is threatened with closure, partly because it is profitable and thus ripe for privatization (“If the state is seen to work, we shall never be rid of it”) and partly because of low turnover – long-term patients who fail either to recover or expire are clogging up the beds for new needy patients, turning the hospital into a virtual old folks home. The hospital’s manager is doing his best to highlight the facility’s importance to the community: he has brought in a film crew to make a documentary; stages musical performances by the patients featuring ditties from their youth; and works hard to impress one patient’s visiting son, who just happens to be a civil servant working on streamlining the NHS. The patients are a mixed crew of varying degrees of senility tended by an overworked staff, including a good-for-nothing intern who would rather be elsewhere. Meanwhile, the head nurse, who actually has to deal with those patients in all their ailments and idiosyncrasies (with a low tolerance for the incontinent), takes her own action to increase the hospital’s efficiency.

There are plenty of witty lines and oddball characters livening up the evening, not to mention the well chosen musical numbers, staged by Arlene Phillips. One great scene features the would-be heirs of one patient angry at the hospital over her suspiciously early death solely because of the implications for their inheritance.

But old people, like nuns, are funny just sitting there, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Bennett was making lazy use of that. Also, the plot was not always credible. In particular, the nurse’s method of clearing out her patients, while hardly unthinkable these days, is unrealistic as presented here: she takes action against one of her favorites just for wetting himself, the highly articulate man being accused suddenly can’t explain his situation (the urine was actually dumped on him by the sleazy intern), an old woman happens to have a video camera in bed in the middle of the night, the staff hired to make the documentary abruptly becomes the enemy, and so forth. Surely the creators can do better than this.

And there’s more: homophobia towards the gay civil servant (whose father was conversely a Thatcher-hating coal miner), xenophobia as the Indian doctor fails to win renewal of his visa when he can’t sing all of “Land of Hope and Glory”, disparagement of rural communities by London-centric bureaucrats interested only in productivity and profits. I suppose we can call all this a cry for greater compassion as an efficiency-driven England takes over from a kinder and gentler generation. But it’s all a bit much.

Still, while Bennett doesn’t necessarily hit his various marks, he knows how to write an engaging show. In addition to the musical numbers, the evening is helped by especially strong performances by Deborah Findlay as the head nurse, Peter Forbes as the hospital manager, Jeff Rawle as the former miner and Simon Williams as the former teacher forever waiting for a Godot who never shows.