Int’l Critics Line: Richard Eyre’s ‘Allelujah’
deadline.comNothing has illustrated the current turmoil in British politics quite as starkly as the recent tanking of the pound against the dollar, a puzzle even to the ruling party whose prime minister and chancellor caused it.
Richard Eyre’s fitfully funny Allelujah reflects this schism in more ways than one, balancing broad grey-pound comedy and seriously macabre drama with the result that a seemingly gentle satire inexplicably dives into a murky existential abyss in its final act.
Even fans of Alan Bennett, the famously folksy playwright and national treasure of the north, will struggle with the juxtaposition of wry bathos and savagery, the latter ramped up from Allelujah’s original incarnation as a Bennett stage play sprinkled with Dennis Potter-style song-and-dance numbers.
The subject is the UK’s National Health Service, once the envy of the world and now the subject of a massive culture war between the sentimental left and the neoliberal right, who want to sell it off in favor of the insurance-based U.S.
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