Director Nicholas Hytner with Ralph Fiennes and Roger Allam

(Inadvertently I went to a captioned performance: note to self not to do that again until the time comes when it’s actually necessary.)

It was OK. The choral society of a Yorkshire mill town in 1916 puts on an amateur performance of The Dream of Gerontius. They are in the middle of war: many men have already been killed or wounded, and more will be sent to the front after their eighteenth birthdays to risk the same fate. Poignancy is always there. Art, community, endeavour are ways of transcending the brute reality. Fiennes and Allam are very good. The film is typically Alan Bennett in its Yorkshireness, whether humour or bluntness, and there was certainly one scene that he’s used before. In the end, however, I found it very hit and miss and too baggy: there were too many short scenes covering class, morality, grief, repression, sexuality, larking about, art or anti-German feeling that the film doesn’t have a chance to gel. And the performance of the Dream is a a very modern interpretation and, I thought, ineffectively shot.

It was partly filmed in Saltaire; I recognised it immediately.