The Choral Review: The Song of a War-Torn Community

The devastation of war is not simply on the battlefield. The idea of the home front may summon ideas of home fires burning, but at its worst it’s a subtle devastation. Take Great Britain during World War I. A generation of young men was butchered in the trenches, and the only people left behind were those that would not be taken for the front: women, old men, those rejected on medical grounds. These communities were hollowed out, and those scars still run deep, a century later.

Delicacy on these matters is quite possibly why scriptwriter Alan Bennett sets period musical drama The Choral in the fictional Yorkshire town of Ramsden (the name a nod to one of the county’s most famous fish-and-chip shops). It’s typical of such places in the shadow of the dark satanic mills yet still surrounded by pleasant pastures. In 1916, the only men left are too young or too old to sign up, or mutilated and recuperating in the nearby military hospital. However, the local choir must still go on, the last bastion of a populace trying to hang on to some prewar normalcy.

There’s no such thing as normalcy in the life of new choirmaster Dr. Henry Guthrie. Portrayed by Ralph Fiennes as the picture of quiet desperation, he’s a man of no land. British by birth and yet drawn to the cultural life of pre-war Germany, he’s now infamous in the streets and ginnels for being friends with the Hun.

Bennett remains the finest writer of the dialects and dry humor of the North of England. When Alderman Duxbury (Roger Allam) raises concerns that their new choirmaster is an atheist (one of many strikes against him), a rebuttal comes from committee member Mr. Fyton (Mark Addy). “There are atheists now,” he notes. “There’s one in Bradford.”

Bennett’s true genius is not merely in his words – although few have ever achieved his flair for simplicity and wit. It’s in his compassion. In the hands of a lesser writer, Duxbury would be a bombastic, bullying stereotype of a mill boss. Instead, he’s touched by tragedy and self-doubt, well aware that the only reason he gets lead parts is because he’s paying the choir’s bills. Bennett is still unabashedly political, the whole text being a scalding and still tragically timely cant against ruling classes that dispatch their “lessers” to slaughter – and, equally, Bennett takes unerring swipes at the plagues of small-mindedness and jingoism among the British working and middle classes. But in his huge ensemble, every character carries their own redemptive notes, whether it be the Salvation Army volunteer, Mary (Amara Okereke), who refuses to remove her bonnet, or the young lads Ellis (Taylor Uttley) and Stanley (Oliver Briscombe) charged to deliver bereavement telegrams, or Mrs. Bishop (Lyndsey Marshal), the local lady of ill-repute, or pianist Robert Horner (Robert Emms), who becomes Guthrie’s confidante.

In some ways Horner’s bond with Guthrie echoes how director Nicholas Hytner understands fellow Northerner Bennett like none other. Reuniting their partnership that goes back to their stage version of The Wind in the Willows in 1990 and transferred to the screen with The Madness of King George, he grasps Bennett’s smirking dismissal of silliness and pomposity, as summed up by the appearance of Simon Russell Beale as Sir Edward Elgar. The great British composer becomes an interloper in Ramsden due to all the choral constants – Bach, Brahms, even honorary Englishman Handel – being verboten due to their Germanic roots. Thus, Guthrie is forced to land upon Elgar’s obscure and controversial The Dream of Gerontius for the choir’s next performance. Guthrie’s version becomes a reenvisioning of Elgar’s Catholic devotional that ties it in a profound and moving fashion to the time and place of The Choral, and the underlying idea that a little music, a little companionship, can’t stop the horror but it can provide a respite.

This article appears in January 16 • 2026.