Alan Bennett has a surprise for those who thought he’d written his last work for the stage: he’s penned a new play.
‘His response to old age is to go on writing plays — that’s a pretty good response,’ said director Nicholas Hytner of his most frequent collaborator.
The 83-year-old dramatist has written Allelujah!, set in the Dusty Springfield geriatric ward of a local hospital on the edge of the Pennines in West Yorkshire.
Hytner called Allelujah! ‘very funny, very touching, and quite alarming’.
New work: Nicholas Hytner, left, and Alan Bennett, right, who has surprised all by penning a new play
It will begin performances on July 11 at The Bridge: the new powerhouse theatre established on the south side of Tower Bridge by Hytner and business partner Nick Starr who, until three years ago, ran the National Theatre together for more than a decade.
Current Bridge production Julius Caesar has become one of the most talked about plays of the year so far.
Hytner, who has worked with Bennett on seven plays and three films, including The History Boys and The Lady In The Van, told me he was full of admiration for Bennett. ‘It’s a remarkable thing, his career,’ he observed, pointing out that Bennett found fame in 1960 when he co-wrote and performed in Beyond The Fringe.
‘The Fringe is now an ancient cultural touchstone; and the same guy who was there doing Beyond The Fringe still writes urgent plays that people need to see.’
He added: ‘I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that he himself is over 80, but more to the point he, like so many people, has lived through his parents’ extreme old age.’
Hytner said Bennett’s new play reflects ‘pretty accurately the diverse array of characters you would find’ when visiting or working in the old-fashioned, cradle-to-the-grave hospital.
And Bennett has plenty of experience with hospitals. He wrote in one of his collection of diaries that he longed to remove his mother from the ‘yelling hellhole’ of a care home she’d been in. And when he was being treated for cancer 20 years ago (he got the all-clear long ago) he used both private and NHS hospitals but said the NHS had ‘more jokes’.
Hytner said he imagined every director must dream of having a collaboration with a playwright which goes on for decades (he first worked with Bennett in 1989 on his adaptation of The Wind In The Willows, which opened at the National in 1990).
‘I’m always the first person to read Alan’s plays. And I guess that’s what every director wants: to be the first director who reads a great playwright’s plays, and who is that playwright’s constant first choice.’
Bennett, for his part, has said that Hytner gets the balance of encouragement versus criticism exactly right when bringing a new work to the stage.
The director agreed that Bennett ‘does like to be told that it’s worth persevering; but doesn’t like to be told that it’s all marvellous’.
There are some playwrights, he added, who have ‘done all the work by the time you read the play’. Like Martin McDonagh, whose new work, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, will run at The Bridge from October 10.
McDonagh’s film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri won two best picture trophies, and three other honours at last Sunday’s Bafta ceremony. Hytner said McDonagh’s plays are ‘watertight by the time he lets anybody read them; whereas a lot of playwrights — Alan’s amongst them — want to hand over a first draft to see where somebody else thinks the play is going.
‘It’s not that one is better than the other. It’s just that the journeys to get to the first performance are different.’
- Lucinda Coxon has adapted Harriet Lane’s page-turner Alys, Always for Nicholas Hytner to direct at the Bridge next year. The story of Frances Thorpe, a journalist who helps a woman in a car crash, is like a dark Howards End meets All About Eve. Hytner said there’s a ‘great big role’ for an actress to play Thorpe.
Rocketman Taron takes off
Taron Egerton was in a London recording studio yesterday preparing for his screen portrayal of Elton John. He recorded two numbers at the Abbey Road studios — though those at the session refused to reveal which two.
Award-winning Lee Hall, who wrote the musical Billy Elliot with Elton, has written the screenplay for Rocketman, which will explore how Reginald Kenneth Dwight became the superstar Elton John.
Egerton won’t be using a backing track. He has a fine voice. I know, because I’ve heard him sing. We were halfway up a mountain in Germany at the time, but the voice is the real deal.
Taron Egerton, pictured at the EE British Academy Film Awards 2018, will play Elton John
And, of course, he even sang an Elton song onscreen a couple of years ago, when he belted out I’m Still Standing for the animated movie Sing, when he voiced a gorilla in a crime gang.
Producer Matthew Vaughn and director Dexter Fletcher are hoping filming can start in mid-May or early June, once the complex rights are sorted.
Egerton will portray Elton from the age of 18; while a younger actor will play him in his teens, when he studied at the Royal Academy of Music.
Rocketman will follow his friendship with lyricist Bernie Taupin, with whom he wrote Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Bennie And The Jets and Crocodile Rock among many others. I’m told Hall’s script does not sugarcoat the more juicy parts of Elton’s life story; and the film may end up with an 18 rating.
This column broke the news of Egerton’s casting last July. The young actor has become a success thanks to roles in Vaughn’s Kingsman films, and his portrayal of Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards two years ago.
He will be seen in the title role of Robin Hood, along with Jamie Foxx and Jamie Dornan, in September.
Watch out for…
Jaimie Pruden, David Haydn and Alex James Ellison, who will star in director Dominic Shaw’s production of the Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon musical adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.
I saw the original Broadway version of this show, about a heartbroken father who restricts his son’s life until a young girl comes to stay.
And I was pleased to hear that Shaw is stripping it back, to give it more of a modern feel when it runs at the new Barn Theatre in Cirencester from March 16. The cast will also play musical instruments. And garden (just kidding). ‘It’s rustic, but contemporary,’ Shaw told me.