Allelujah! is Alan Bennett's new play which opened in London last year. Unfortunately it has a cast of thousands (well, 25) which has made it difficult to prepare for the group. Therefore, I hope you'll bear with me: if there are 10 of us then we'll do Allelujah! If there are less then we'll read Travels with my Aunt.
Allelujah! by Alan Bennett
Allelujah! is an NHS
drama set in a friendly hospital in rural Yorkshire. Colin, an ambitious local
boy turned metropolitan yuppie, has arrived from London to visit his sick
father and he takes the opportunity to assess the efficiency of the hospital on
behalf of his bosses at the health department in Whitehall. Meanwhile, a TV
crew has found evidence that a staff member is murdering elderly patients to
create vacant beds for new arrivals.
In
reality Allelujah! is a musical and not strictly politically
accurate: the latter I'm going to ignore and the former will also be mentioned
but we will not be singing and I will not be choreographing dance routines!
Not just a play - also a film starring Maggie Smith.
While attending the cremation of his mother's remains, London bank manager Henry Pulling meets eccentric Augusta Bertram, a woman who claims to be his aunt and announces that the woman who raised him was not his biological mother. She invites him back to her apartment, where her lover, an African fortune teller named Zachary Wordsworth, is waiting for her. Shortly after she receives a package allegedly containing the severed finger of her true love, Ercole Visconti, with a note promising the two will be reunited upon payment of $100,000.
Augusta asks Henry to accompany her to Paris and he agrees, unaware she actually is smuggling £50,000 out of England and transporting it to Turkey for a gangster named Crowder in exchange for a £10,000 fee she can put toward the ransom ... and I will not spoil it for you by saying any more!
