{"id":1641,"date":"2018-07-25T17:42:48","date_gmt":"2018-07-25T16:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1641"},"modified":"2018-07-25T17:42:48","modified_gmt":"2018-07-25T16:42:48","slug":"propwatch-the-drip-in-allelujah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2018\/07\/propwatch-the-drip-in-allelujah.html","title":{"rendered":"Propwatch: the drip in Allelujah!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You may think you know what it feels like to be patronised. Well, become an elderly person \u2013 or someone who cares for them \u2013 and prepare to have the crap condescended out of you.
\nAs soon as you\u2019re in a vulnerable position, people who would otherwise talk to you as a relatively competent adult breeze into your home, and tell you how bad you are at making the bed, or a cup of tea. They make unsolicited suggestions, loudly and slowly. They call your father \u2018dad\u2019. They don\u2019t call you anything at all.<\/p>\n

There are all sorts of pisspoor reasons for this, but one of them is bodily functions. Lose perfect control of bowel and bladder, and people assume that the mind has dribbled out with them. Waste isn\u2019t a comfortable conversation point, so being forced to confront it produces resistance, denial, dismissal.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m just taking my friend for a walk,\u2019 says Mary, an elderly patient in Allelujah!<\/a>,<\/em> Alan Bennett\u2019s fascinating bumpy ride of a new play at London’s Bridge Theatre. She refers to the drip she lugs behind her as she crosses the stage. In her working life, Mary was a librarian, but now she\u2019s just another inconvenient biddy at the Bethlehem Hospital (\u2018the Beth\u2019). She\u2019s played by Julia Foster<\/a> \u2013 whose previous roles include Tommy Steele\u2019s perky beloved in Half A Sixpence<\/em><\/a> and a blazing Margaret in the Wars of the Roses plays in the BBC Shakespeare series. But now she\u2019s another elderly actor: not a dame, no longer a star, but still a diamond.<\/p>\n

The drip – like the other characters’ catheters and bottles – is key because bodily functions are inescapable in this play about the besieged NHS, but also about how helpless we are in the face of helplessness. This small local hospital faces closure, but geriatric care is about as unsexy a subject as possible. No one wants to think about alzheimers or incontinence. The Beth\u2019s protest campaign centres on the elderly patients\u2019 choir \u2013 shimmying their way through vintage tunes like Good Morning and Good Golly, Miss Molly (in Nicholas Hytner\u2019s production they totter between realism and fantasy, never quite going the whole Singing Detective<\/em>). Feelgood routines can\u2019t disguise the ward\u2019s true business: managing decline, charting the shuffle from tired to terminal. There\u2019s no feelgood ending for these patients, who have, as the head nurse sighs, \u2018left it too late to die.\u2019<\/p>\n

That\u2019s perhaps the most brutally acute of Bennett\u2019s lines in Allelujah!<\/em> He\u2019s a fastidious writer but not a prissy one. Miss Shepherd, aka The Lady in the Van<\/em><\/a>, tosses malodorous packages of poo out of her camper van window and onto his driveway. Here too the terror of losing control of bowel and bladder is constant: a humiliation, and something that pushes you out of full personhood. A catheter is like an invisibility machine \u2013 no one sees the person attached to it. On the Beth\u2019s Shirley Bassey ward, appearing to lose an iron grip on your bladder can spell a death sentence.<\/p>\n

Shake her till her dentures drop out<\/strong><\/p>\n

Part of the pity of this needs-another-draft play is that Mary too is forgotten by Bennett. She has some spoiler-unfriendly business with another prop, a camera, that closes the first half \u2013 but once that\u2019s done, she too is shuffled aside, no longer of interest to characters or their creator. The curse of the drip strikes again.<\/p>\n

Bennett knows how people in authority speak to those without, especially when dealing with the elderly and infirm. The playwright has had national treasure status thrust upon him \u2013 but this notional cosiness ignores the scalding rage that courses through his writing. In one of his published diaries, he describes being ignored by a negligent receptionist while making a hospital appointment. \u2018I long to drag her across the counter and shake her till her dentures drop out,\u2019 he fumes, wishing he could exhort her to \u2018Be nice,<\/em> you cow.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the theatre documentary Nothing Like a Dame<\/em>,<\/a> a wonderfully testy Judi Dench, now 83, describes the patronising young medic who recently treated her for a hornet\u2019s sting. \u2018What\u2019s our name?\u2019 he booms. She mutters a reply. \u2018And have we got a carer?\u2019 he continues. \u2018Fuck off! I\u2019ve just done eight weeks in The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> at the Garrick.\u2019 Never patronise Dame Judi.<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may think you know what it feels like to be patronised. Well, become an elderly person \u2013 or someone who cares for them \u2013 and prepare to have the crap condescended out of you. As soon as you\u2019re in a vulnerable position, people who would otherwise talk to you as a relatively competent adult […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[489,322,321,34],"class_list":{"0":"post-1641","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-bridge-theatre","9":"tag-props","10":"tag-propwatch","11":"tag-theatre","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1643,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions\/1643"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}