Alan Bennett, now 91, is one of the last living writers who grew up in the shadow of not just the Second World War – but the First World War too. He was brought up in Leeds, surrounded by First Word War veterans and war widows.
Bennett is completely drenched in the past, but not in a rose-tinted version. It’s more nostalgia in its original Greek sense – the pain of going back.
No wonder he is pitch perfect in The Choral, a quite wonderful film. It’s very moving and very funny – the rare combination that Bennett specialises in, where the poignancy heightens the humour and vice versa.
It’s the story of the Choral Society, set in 1916 in a Yorkshire mill town – filmed in Saltaire’s splendid, robust classical terraces and mighty Salts Mill.
The tragedy of war is the ever-present background to the story but, cleverly, you never see a single scene on the Front.
Because the upmarket male singers of the Choral have joined up, the society must recruit rough teenagers – and a new choirmaster, in the shape of Dr Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes).
Fiennes is in his element as the melancholy, buttoned-up Guthrie – who has to conceal not only his homosexuality but also the fact that his lover is from Germany, where Guthrie worked before the war.
One of the many tightly wound strands of Bennett’s inspired plot is how the most beautiful German music is brutally damned by the war. The Choral were to sing the St Matthew Passion, but Bach is now banned – as are Brahms and Beethoven.
And so the Choral settles on Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, which allows for a masterly cameo by Simon Russell Beale, playing Elgar as a pompous, camp luvvie – horrified by Guthrie’s butchering of his masterpiece to accommodate the restricted cast of a war-battered town.
Bennett calls on the best character actors as the backbone of the Choral’s patrician committee: Alun Armstrong as the grumpy town undertaker; Mark Addy as the photographer, snapping the lads before they set off to fight; and Roger Allam as the town’s mill-owning tycoon, his grandiosity concealing the tragedy of his son, an early victim of the war.
Director Nicholas Hytner, Bennett’s long-term collaborator, deftly weaves all those plot strands together into a single gripping drama, without the mini subplots ever seeming gratuitous or incomprehensible.
There’s the mill girl whose sweetheart is missing in action and so she embarks on another romance – only for her original squeeze to return from the war, minus an arm. Then there’s the ageing town tart (Lyndsey Marshal), who selflessly sleeps with a virgin just before he heads for the Front.
As so often with Bennett, there’s plenty of sex, full of awkwardness and longing. If Harold Pinter was, to use the hackneyed phrase, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, Alan Bennett is the cream puff – and the long-dormant vibrator – under the settee.
In one scene that would have been ham-fisted in another writer’s hands, the amputee asks his departing girlfriend for one last favour – to masturbate him because he’s lost his right hand and hasn’t yet trained up the left. She does so – and then he bursts into tears.
All this could be bleak – modern films love to be bleak. But Bennett’s inspired humour always comes in to lift the mood, change the tone and maintain your constant attention.
The late Barry Cryer (1935-2022), born in Leeds a year after Bennett, often used to ring him up. Bennett would cry, ‘Joke! Joke!’ – hungry for some of Barry’s perfectly delivered lines.
Barry wondered why Yorkshire produced fewer comedians and comic writers than Lancashire (not forgetting Leeds-born Ernie Wise, whose centenary is celebrated on page 16).
Bennett said he prefers Yorkshire’s low-key humour to the cheeky-chappie Cockney and Lancashire variety.
That laconic, glass-half-empty Yorkshire wit is in full flow here. And the Bennett miracle is to combine deadpan humour and outré sex with high art.
Guthrie suddenly quotes German – causing horror all round – when he recalls his favourite St Matthew Passion lines. The amputated squaddie sings in Latin as Gerontius.
But it’s never clever-clever for the sake of it; never the writer advertising his planet-sized brain, as so many vain writers like to do. It’s all in the service of that Bennett cocktail – a mixture not so much of high- and lowbrow, but of serious and comic. And unique – long may he continue to write.
