The Choral

Alan Bennett writer, Nicholas Hytner director, Natalie Murray Peale music director, Joseph Judge choral music director, George Fenton composer and arranger

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s magnificent account of Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ last year, with Beth Taylor as the Angel was the first time I’d heard the choral work live. It is sung  less often now than it used to be, so it’s come as a pleasant surprise to watch a new film, written by Alan Bennett and directed by Nicholas Hytner which has as its centre an amateur performance of the work.

Alan Bennett’s status (unsought by him, I imagine) of ‘National Treasure’ can make us forget his extensive career in the theatre, acting, directing and writing. In the last thirty years his collaborations with director Nicholas Hyntner in National Theatre productions which  transferred to the screen have included ‘The Madness of George III’ and ‘The History Boys’. Even earlier he wrote plays for television and film screenplays. ‘The Choral’ is his first original screenplay in 40 years since the hilarious ‘A Private Function’.

Set in 1916 in the fictional Yorkshire town of Ramsden, handsomely represented by Saltaire, Joshua Salt’s model village and mill, the story concerns the town’s Choral Society, severely depleted by the exodus of young men to the war, and widening its search for singers, and new repertoire for its annual concert.  Roger Allam plays Alderman Bernard Duxbury, the millowner and Alun Armstrong, Mr Trickett, the undertaker, generous patrons of the choir, in which they take decisions and the best roles. The mature female singers are losing their voices but not their sense of entitlement: “We’re not auditioning,” one of them says to young newcomer Mary, “we’re long-standing.”  (Allam and Armstong were in the original cast of ‘Les Miserables’, and sing with obvious enjoyment in this film)

The younger actors, many recruited in Yorkshire in 2024 – a sense of humour was one of the requirements - are the life-force of this film. The acting is persuasive and the singing top-class. Roger Allam in a Guardian interview says that ‘nearly all’ the music was sung by the actors.  The influx of younger men and women, into the choir to replace their absent contemporaries has a bracing effect on its social mix, while the necessity to appoint a new choir master, Dr Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes, in a well-judged performance where wry humour masks his recent bereavement) stirs up anti- German feeling and homophobia: “Put it this way, I think I would prefer a family man, “ says the vicar.

The half dozen young men who are central to the story remind us of Bennett’s similarly-aged grammar-school lads in ‘The History Boys’. One of the poems they learned in that play was Philip Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ with its refrain “never such innocence again”.  Here Bennett creates a similar elegiac sense in his portrayal of these young people’s last months of freedom.  

At the heart of the film is the music chosen and arranged by George Fenton, a longstanding collaborator with Bennett and Hytner. There’s music throughout the film: the Salvation Army band playing hymns on the pavement, the Gilbert and Sullivan arias  chosen as audition pieces, including  the poignant and securely harmonised ‘Three Little Maids’ from a trio of wounded servicemen on a hospital ward, one with eyes bandaged. The music hall  audition piece  is cut short as “lacking decorum”, and the lads in the pub sing ‘Tipperary’.  Mary and Clyde both sing Handel arias for their auditions, simply and beautifully with piano accompaniment. Nigerian British actor Amara Okereke, who’s sung award-winning roles in music theatre, plays Salvation Army officer, Mary: her  ‘Angels Ever Bright and Fair’; points towards her role as Elgar’s Angel. North Yorkshire born Jacob Dudman plays Clyde: his ‘Where’er You Walk’ is an escape from his bitterness at his fiancee’s desertion.

Why was ‘The Death of Gerontius’, in an altered version, chosen for the choir? Dr Guthrie has conducted it in Germany (where in fact Elgar’s work had a better initial reception than it had in the UK). It also links to a theme which pervades the film: the death of young men. The film opens with one seventeen year old accompanying his Post Office worker friend as he delivers telegrams “from the King” – three in one morning. Mr Trickett in full funeral garb bemoans the scarcity of business as he presides over a “civilian” funeral tea –“All this bereavement and this is the first in two weeks.” Alderman Duxbury, a baritone, isn’t up to singing the role of Gerontius, but he balks at offering it to  the young tenor, Clyde. ”Gerontius is an old man – it’s in the name.” The pianist – later revealed as a conscientious objector - says, ”It’s the young men who are dying now.”

Anyone who’s been in a choir will query whether presenting a reduced and altered score of a modern work is remotely possible in four weeks!  But the rehearsal scenes indoors and outside capture the concentration as well as the pleasure in communal singing, and the performance brings not only joy but catharsis.

Near the end Simon Russell Beale’s cameo threatens to steal the show, but I’ll give no more away!