Director – Nicholas Hytner – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12a – 113m
*****
Against the backdrop of WW1 and a dwindling male population, the choral society of a small Yorkshire village attempts to mount a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 7th
The fictional town of Ramsden, Yorkshire, 1916. World War One has been raging almost two years in France, but that almost seems like a distant world to 17-year-old lads Ellis (Taylor Uttley) and Lofty (Oliver Briscombe) whose main concern is eyeing up the local girls and working out their chances. Almost. Because Lofty’s job as a telegram boy, on which rounds Ellis accompanies him, means he’s delivering news of deaths from the Front to wives waiting anxiously at home and, following the 1916 Conscription Act requiring men aged 18 and above to join the armed forces, conscription notes to households from the King. (Prior to the Act, joining up had been voluntary although there was considerable moral and social pressure on men to do so.)
Closer to home, a more immediate concern looms for Ramsden in the form of the local choir, which has just lost its musical director to the army. Its organiser, local mill owner and sometime tenor Alderman Duxbury (Roger Allam), has recently taken a chance on hiring Dr. Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), a British conductor who has been working in Germany. Unfortunately, proposed performance pieces like Handel’s Messiah attract the entirely understandable criticism that they are German – the enemy in the current war, and therefore entirely unsuitable. Unfortunately, all the great compositions appear to be German, from the likes of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but eventually the good Doctor manages to find one that isn’t – The Dream of Gerontius by English composer Sir Edward Elgar.
Elgar’s piece poses a number of problems, including that it’s technically very difficult to perform and requires a large orchestra which isn’t something a little Yorkshire village like Ramsden possesses. Moreover, it’s about an old man and the possibility of entering the afterlife, not a theme that sits terribly well with a time when young men are being called up for war, many of them never to return.
Thus, the stage is set for an ensemble drama in which very different themes are explored through very different characters. A third young lad Mitch (Shaun Thomas from The Selfish Giant, Clio Barnard, 2013) is pursuing Mary (Amara Okereke), although the likelihood of any immediate physical gratification on his part is tempered by her chaste moral outlook as a committed Salvation Army volunteer.
After Mitch has got his call up papers, he goes to spend an evening with her and, deeply in love but realising no physical fulfilment is coming his way, takes off his clothes to expose himself so she’ll remember him naked. In other hands, the gesture could so easily have been cheap and ill-judged, yet Bennett is concerned with the effects of war on people caught up in it and the moment rings deeply true, trying to articulate feelings that are near impossible to articulate.
Anyone pursuing Bella (Emily Fairn) might have more luck. She has a boyfriend, but he’s gone off to war, and she anxiously awaits his return. The question, for anyone who might want to get together for her, is how serious is she about waiting. Not that serious, as it turns out; she knows he’s dead and not coming back, so is prepared to throw in her lot with someone else.
And then, halfway through the film, by which time she has another relationship in full swing, in one of the most devastating scenes you will ever see in a cinema, Clyde (Jacob Dudman) turns up on her doorstep, very much alive albeit minus one arm.
Not that all the examinations of sexual peccadilloes are so upsetting; Much humour is had in scenes involving the town prostitute Mrs. Bishop (Lyndsey Marshal) who seemingly services all the men in the town above a certain age. Even so, she too gets caught up in the ramifications of the war and in another deeply affecting scene agrees to sex with a young lad worried that he won’t lose his virginity before he dies at the Front.
All this goes on alongside the expected drama of the choral society itself. Things build to a head in this regard when composer Elgar (Simon Russell Beale) is persuaded by one enthusiastic singer to visit, and he is so horrified by what has been done to the staging of his piece that he forbids its performance, leaving the choir with a seemingly insoluble problem… Part of what he objects to is that Clyde, traumatised by his experiences at the front but unexpectedly possessed of an amazing singing voice which has persuaded Dr. Guthrie to cast him, plays Gerontius as a young soldier about to meet his death rather than the old man the composer had envisaged. It may speak more powerfully to those present given the zeitgeist, but Elgar isn’t having it.
And yet, with their choral singing is giving meaning to those involved in the performance, they have to find a way of getting round the composer’s legal prohibition.
Before seeing this, I was worried that it might have been another of those twee parochial dramas of which the UK film industry is so fond. But it really isn’t. What prevents it falling into this trap is, primarily, its head on tackling of much bigger issues. In particular, a down to earth, frank approach to sex – without resorting to titillation or wallowing in acres of flesh – is placed in the shadow of men, including young men, being sent off to war and, in many cases, death, which suddenly puts everything else in very clear perspective.
Alan Bennett can, I think, be justifiably proud of having written this – his script is really something very special. Reliable direction from his longtime collaborator Nicholas Hytner and a superb cast of seasoned performers, who also include Alun Armstrong and Mark Addy as the town’s undertaker and photographer respectively, and newcomers as the younger characters, ensure that the production is well served. The fictional Ramsden has been filmed in Yorkshire’s Saltaire, making you believe the place as part of that very unique and distinctive English county in what I can only describe, meaning this in the nicest possible way, as ‘Yorkshire porn’. Not only a treat, but one which takes its audience with it even as tackles some truly tough life and death issues about war, without shirking their implications. An altogether remarkable film.
The Choral is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, November 7th.
Trailer: