Nicholas Hytner (2025)
In television work of the 1970s and 1980s, Alan Bennett often collaborated with directors who already were or soon would be accomplished filmmakers – Lindsay Anderson, Stephen Frears and John Schlesinger are three names that immediately come to mind. Cinema versions of Bennett’s later stage work have been in the hands of directors who are big names in theatre but less effective behind a camera. Richard Eyre directed the film of Allelujah (2022), Bennett’s most recent stage play; before then, Nicholas Hytner was at the helm for The Madness of King George (1994), The History Boys (2006) and The Lady in the Van (2015). Hytner is back for The Choral, not an adaptation from the stage but the first original screenplay that Bennett has written for cinema since A Private Function (1984), and which is showing at the London Film Festival before its imminent general release. As comedy, The Choral is far from subtle; as drama, usually clumsy; yet the film is affecting, too.
The Choral is set in South Yorkshire during the First World War, a combination of place and time used by Bennett in the first television drama he ever wrote, A Day Out (directed by Stephen Frears and originally shown on BBC in 1972). Strictly speaking, this wasn’t a Great War story: none of the action happens between 1914 and 1918; the outing of the title is a ride by men from the Halifax cycling club to and from Fountains Abbey, one Sunday in the summer of 1911. Yet a viewer’s realisation that the cyclists may soon be soldiers in the trenches ensures that the coming conflict shadows the piece throughout; A Day Out ends in 1919, when some of the same group gather at a war memorial to pay their respects to former companions who didn’t survive. The Choral is more straightforwardly a World War I tale, which takes place in a fictional small town, Ramsden, close to a real, bigger one, Huddersfield. (The village of Saltaire and its environs were the main shooting locations.) It’s 1916, and the local choral society is struggling to keep up numbers. Many of their male voices are serving in the armed forces. The choir’s star tenor, Clyde, is missing in action and presumed dead. When their chorus master (Thomas Howes) decides it’s his patriotic duty to join up the society urgently needs to find a replacement.
The early sequences announce what’s in store. Two teenagers, Ellis (Taylor Uttley) and Lofty (Oliver Brinscombe), head on their bikes into Ramsden from the surrounding countryside. ‘England,’ declares Ellis, ‘we’re fodder for the mill, and we’ll be fodder for the Front’. Lofty already wears uniform: he’s a telegram boy, the deliverer of bad news to women in Ramsden’s terraced streets. The sight of a good-looking girl, Mary Lockwood (Amara Okereke), causes Ellis and Lofty to change direction and follow her, never mind Mary’s Salvation Army uniform, into a parish hall where the choir is holding auditions for new members. The man in charge is Alderman Duxbury (Roger Allam), choir stalwart and sponsor, and mill owner. He reprimands another young auditionee, Mitch (Shaun Thomas), for his unkempt appearance. ‘I’ve come straight from work at t’mill,’ Mitch explains, ‘Oose mill?’ demands Duxbury, ‘Yours’, says Mitch. A bit later, Duxbury and other senior men in the choir – an undertaker (Alun Armstrong), a vicar (Ron Cook) and a portrait photographer (Mark Addy) – discuss who might be approached as choirmaster, and the name of Dr Henry Guthrie comes up. Guthrie is highly rated as a musician, but he has ‘peculiarities’ (it’s somehow known he’s homosexual) and has only just returned to England after living and working abroad – in Germany, of all places. He’s an atheist, to boot, although, as the man-of-the-world photographer points out, ‘There are atheists now – there’s one in Bradford’.
That last line raises a smile. The other dialogue quoted above, reasonably typical of the script overall, seems rather desperate – that goes for Duxbury’s dim sitcom bit with Mitch, as much as Ellis’s clunky political history point-making. More of the latter is to follow – as when one of the women in the story announces there’ll be no more wars once women get the vote. Clyde’s sweetheart, Bella (Emily Fairn), herself a choir member, has assumed he’s dead and has her eye on someone new. When Clyde (Jacob Dudman), alive and well but minus one arm, turns up at her front door, Bella faints, convincingly; once she comes to, she unconvincingly makes clear to Clyde that he’s a thing of the past. Alan Bennett doesn’t supply enough reason for the choir’s old guard to swallow their prejudices and engage Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes). After uneasily accepting their offer and, with his right-hand man, the pianist Robert Horner (Robert Emms), in tow, Guthrie embarks on a vocal talent-spotting tour of unexpected places in Ramsden – a hospital, a baker’s shop, and so on. We might as well be watching one of Gareth Malone’s TV choir-making efforts, except that the follow-up on those is tidier than it is here: a trio of men in the hospital who sing ‘Three Little Maids’ from The Mikado quite pleasantly, aren’t seen or heard of again.
The line about Bradford’s atheist raises a smile not because it’s brilliant but because it’s so recognisably Bennett and makes you grateful to and for him. What’s more remarkable about the film is that who its author is, at one level eclipses much of what’s wrong with it. Alan Bennett is ninety-one now. It’s not only amazing that he wrote this screenplay at all; The Choral is also worthwhile as a testament to Bennett’s political views in old age. The awkward conception of Guthrie as a gay Germanophile reflects the writer’s furious despair about British intolerance more than a century on from the era that he’s describing. Linking xenophobia in Brexit Britain to provincial hatred of all things Hun at a time when the country was at war with Germany, is a very dubious connection to make, but it seems genuinely to express what Bennett now feels.
Guthrie reminds Duxbury et al of German composers’ dominance in the choral music canon. To meet these dismayed choir elders halfway, Guthrie approaches Elgar, with whom he’s acquainted, for permission to do The Dream of Gerontius. Permission is given to perform the piece but not for the interpretive liberties eventually taken by the Ramsden choir. Alderman Duxbury is used to getting the plum tenor solo, but his vocal limitations are only too evident to Guthrie. Clyde, on the other hand, sings wonderfully; and because it’s young men, not old, who are losing their lives in the War, why not turn the dying Gerontius into Clyde, wearing his own soldier’s uniform, and the guardian angel of Gerontius’ soul into a nurse, also in uniform, to be sung by Mary Lockwood (who emerges as the choir’s best female voice)? When Mary discovers that, on the very day of the choir’s concert in the town hall, Elgar will be receiving an honorary doctorate, across the Pennines, from the University of Manchester[1], she writes to the great man, inviting him to call in at Ramsden if he can spare the time. Elgar (Simon Russell Beale) duly arrives, in honorand’s robes and a chauffeured car, but is incandescent to learn how Gerontius has been adapted – in his view, travestied. Withdrawing permission for the performance, he sweeps off in high dudgeon – though not before pointing out that he had lunch the other day with Field Marshal Haig, who assured Elgar the war would be over by Christmas.
It seems surprising that the composer of the music that supplies the film with much of its emotional heft, is portrayed so negatively, but Elgar’s mention of Haig is significant. Over-by-Christmas complacency in England extended far beyond Haig – and well before 1916 – but Bennett, picking up on Ellis’s cannon fodder remark in the opening scene, is evidently keen to skewer the British establishment of which Elgar, as much as Haig, was part. Bennett has spoken publicly about becoming more socialist in old age, about his anger with the policies of New Labour as well as Tory administrations, and that the British class system dies hard. Here, too, The Choral matters because of how it conveys Bennett’s views, even though that’s obviously not a valid measure of dramatic quality. The elements in the film that do amount to real quality are the work of some of the cast, especially Ralph Fiennes.
Henry Guthrie is first seen languishing at a hotel lounge piano, the only work he’s been able to get since returning to England. Once Guthrie starts work with the Ramsden choir, Fiennes gives an admirable impression of a professional musician, marking up a score, reacting to the voices of choir members he’s hearing for the first time, and so on. A choir practice is interrupted by the arrival of news that the German ship Pommern has been sunk in the Battle of Jutland, with the loss of all men on board. Everyone in the parish hall goes into raucous celebration, and join in ‘God Save the King’, except for Guthrie and Horner, who knows that the hundreds of ‘Fritzes’ on the Pommern included Guthrie’s German lover. Fiennes stands, silent and still: his absorption of the news quite transcends the scene’s obvious conception. Even more emotionally potent is an exchange between Guthrie and Clyde, when the older man urges the younger to rejoin the choir. Sad, bitter Clyde doesn’t think he can face seeing Bella at rehearsals; Guthrie talks of the transformative power of art, which he also describes as ‘insensitive’. Guthrie tells Clyde his singing gifts offer him a second chance in life. Many men, he continues, choosing his words with perhaps deliberate insensitivity, ‘would give their right arm’ to have Clyde’s voice. Guthrie admits that ‘Life is shit … so sing!’ This melancholy, tormented man follows hot on the heels of the anguished cardinal Ralph Fiennes played in last year’s Conclave. He needs to guard against being typecast as a sufferer for a second phase in his career, but he’s marvellous here.
The conversation between Clyde and Guthrie, well played by Jacob Dudman as well as by Fiennes, is one of Bennett’s best pieces of writing in The Choral. One of the worst, which probably no actor could redeem, also involves Clyde. For the choir establishment, the downside of The Dream of Gerontius is noxious fumes of Catholicism whirling round the libretto, courtesy of John Henry Newman. When Ron Cook’s parson reminds Guthrie and the choir that ‘there’s no such place as purgatory in the Church of England’, Clyde yells back, ‘No such place as purgatory? I’ll tell you where purgatory is!’ and proceeds, wordily, to do just that: to cut a long story short, purgatory is no man’s land between the trench lines. Other than when they’re faced with irredeemable speeches like this one, the cast delivers rather more than the script deserves. Alderman Duxbury is given a tragic backstory – his son has been killed in the War and Duxbury’s wife (Eunice Roberts) is marooned in grief – but, even before that’s revealed, Roger Allam nuances much of what he’s given to say.
Casting an actor of colour as Mary Lockwood is annoying because Amara Okereke is virtually the only such actor in sight. If the filmmakers were genuinely committed to colour-blind casting, why aren’t there at least a few more Black actors as choir members or other Ramsden locals? Until her mother (uncredited on IMDb) briefly appears late on, Mary is the community’s lone Black, whose Salvation Army garb makes her doubly conspicuous. That said, Amara Okereke plays her charmingly and sings beautifully (it seems most of the cast did their own singing). Mark Addy is characteristically likeable as the photographer but the standout performance, after Ralph Fiennes’, comes from Robert Emms as Horner. It no doubt helps that his dialogues with Guthrie, with whom Horner shares ‘an unspeakable affection’, are consistently subtler than most in the film. Whereas the two men adapt Gerontius to make the title character a young man, Emms is the embodiment of a kind of reverse process. He’ll be forty next year, somewhat older than Horner is probably meant to be, but his pale face and skinniness, which may well have restricted the range of roles he has so far had, allow Emms to pass for younger. As a conscientious objector, Horner attends a military tribunal: his three interrogators (Oliver Chris, Malcolm Sinclair and Fenella Woolgar) are all crude caricatures but Emms, as well as the man he’s playing, survives this ordeal with distinction. This is the second high-class performance from Robert Emms at LFF this year, after his against-the-odds strong contribution to Bad Apples. It’s more enjoyable to watch him in The Choral. In contrast to Bad Apples, his role here isn’t shamefully underwritten.
Despite Elgar’s putting the kibosh on things, the choir, according to let’s-do-the-show-right-here-in-the-barn tradition, goes ahead with the performance, but without charging for entrance. Their reinterpretation includes, as well as singing, tableaux featuring a corps of wounded soldiers back from the Front. The locals that pack the town hall to watch, receive the oratorio with enthralled reverence: you don’t ask quite how this hitherto jingoistic community has turned implicitly pacifist. The performance takes place on the eve of the departure overseas of Ellis, Lofty and Mitch, all now of age to fight. Mitch tries in vain to persuade Mary to have sex before he goes. Where he fails, Lofty succeeds with Mrs Bishop (Lyndsey Marshal), a local prostitute whose clients have also included sex-starved Duxbury and his peers: unlike them, first-timer Lofty isn’t charged for Mrs Bishop’s services. The film’s concluding scene at the Ramsden train station, as the young men go off to war and Horner is escorted away by military police, is in effect a cast curtain call. Although written directly for the screen, The Choral, for the most part, might as well be a stage piece, and that no doubt suits Nicholas Hytner. With much of the action naturally taking place indoors, the direction is jarring only when Hytner goes en plein air with a sequence that doesn’t belong there (like a quasi-impromptu choir rehearsal that culminates in Clyde’s seeing Bella kiss another man). I can’t honestly say The Choral is a good film, but I can’t honestly deny that I’m very glad to have seen it.
17 October 2025
[1] This looks to be an invention for the film. According to Elgar’s Wikipedia entry, his many honorary degrees didn’t include one from Nicholas Hytner’s native city, though he did receive one from Leeds, Bennett’s home turf, in 1904.
