For love there is no charge

Out of mind old people are at the centre of Allelujah! Sian Brookes reviews the film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s play.

Sian Brookes

Sian Brookes is studying for a Doctorate at Aberdeen University. Her research focuses on developing a theological understanding of old age. She studied English and Theology at Cambridge University.

In a hall decorated for a celebration a person stands in front of a seated group, all have their arms raised in celebration.

Jazz hands at the hospital.

BBC Films.

Spoiler alert – this film review reveals significant elements of the plot.

Allelujah! is not a film that shies away from the big issues. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a big issue this comedy/political commentary/drama/part-thriller doesn’t at least make reference to (and yes, it spreads itself across all of these genres too). With such an eclectic approach it is difficult at times to keep up with the narrative, and the deeper meaning of the film. Based on the Alan Bennett play, the plot centres around The Bethlehem, a small northern hospital for geriatric patients, which is facing closure due to the Tory government’s efficiency drive. It focuses on two members of staff, Alma Gilpin, a stoic and matter-of-fact but seemingly excellent nurse who has served the hospital her entire career, and a younger Dr Valentine. Other protagonists include an ex-miner patient and his son, a management consultant who has “made it” to London and is currently advising the Health Secretary to close hospitals such as the one in question for the sake of government finances.

Whether it’s politics or the personal, this film has it all. It deals with levelling up, the cultural and economic gap between the north and south, the challenges of budget cuts in the NHS, the problems of a national health service claiming to 'care' but with managers more preoccupied by Westminster’s economic priorities. It depicts families waiting for older relatives to die in order to grab their inheritance, the broken relationship between an ageing man and his son, and those all-important stories of the older patients’ lives well-lived. And yet as the story line develops, a plot twist emerges which comes to overshadow the entire film, and in the process speaks to what is perhaps the most poignant of the many discussions it raises. Nurse Gilpin, who, until now has appeared consistently caring and committed to her patients, has been quietly administering fatal beakers of milk and morphine to those who she deems to be on “her list” of those who most need relief from their situation. When confronted by the doctor she justifies her actions with a multifaceted answer based on the requirement to provide more beds to a broken healthcare system, but also insisting “I had ended someone’s suffering”.

When Dr Valentine remarks, “I like old people” a visitor responds “not even old people like old people”.

The manner in which Nurse Gilpin goes about what is effectively enforced euthanasia, is deeply chilling. And yet her reasoning is not entirely foreign to us – to end suffering could be deemed a noble cause. In fact, the need to simply delete the reality of suffering, particularly the suffering of the old is one that perhaps is not so uncommon. Throughout Allelujah!,we are reminded of our tendency to run from, to detest, to reject the suffering of the elderly in our society. When Dr Valentine remarks, “I like old people” a visitor responds “not even old people like old people”. A teenage intern declares to a patient “I hope I never live to be your age”. At the same time, characters look back on the days “when the elderly weren’t farmed out”, and questions are asked of families “if they love them, why do they put them away?”. A very good question. Of course, care needs are often too great for families to endure, yet it is still important to ask why the suffering of the old has become a professionalised service, which most of us avoid at all costs. Perhaps the answer to this is that we don’t like to watch the old suffer, we don’t like to watch them die, because their suffering and their death remind us of our future selves, our future suffering, our future death. In our sanitised, anything-is-possible-with-medicine-and-science society, death and the suffering that comes with it, is something from which we flee at all costs. Instead of acknowledging and working with it, we would rather pretend it wasn’t there at all.

And yet, even as we try to avoid it, suffering and death are both certain parts of all our futures. 100% of us will die. For Nurse Gilpin, the solution to this is to bring on death prematurely, to erase the pain, overcome the misery by offering a false hope – that it doesn’t need to exist at all. In direct contrast to this, in a film which is littered with Christian references (Allelujah, The Bethlehem), there is a different approach taken by a messiah-type figure who seems to get everything right. Dr Valentine is compassionate and understanding. He not only challenges the political systems which undermine those most at the margins of society, but also has the kind of bedside manner we would all hope for in a doctor. In a closing monologue Dr Valentine utters the words of the doctors in the NHS, “We will be here when you are old, and we would die for you, we are love itself and for love there is no charge”.

It is this suffering with which is so compelling, this suffering with which is truly sacrificial.

Nurse Gilpin and Dr Valentine offer two fundamentally different approaches to end of life care. One hastens the end quickly, deletes the suffering as efficiently as possible in order to make way for those in less pain. The other sits with those who suffer, holds their hand, gently cares for the human person that is in front of them. Even more, and perhaps most significantly Dr Valentine does not only watch from afar, but is willing to suffer himself for the sake of those in pain - working tirelessly, giving himself over day after day, fighting on with little sleep for limited pay just to make things a little less painful. It is this suffering with which is so compelling, this suffering with which is truly sacrificial, this suffering with which speaks of something much greater than politics, efficiency or inheritance, this suffering with which is indeed “love itself”, completely free of charge. This is the logic that Christians see in the ancient notion of the incarnation, celebrated every Christmas, of God with us. This is what our older people need, this is what we will all need when we grow old. Let us only hope that when we get there, we find the one who is willing to offer it.

Article

Art

Culture

13 August 2025

5 min read

Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak

Unlocking the stillness, from underwater sculpture to St Paul's Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A sculptor works on a carved face emerging from a stone larger than her

Young creating.

Emilyyoung.com

As a painter, Emily Young says she worked relatively quickly in her distinctive surreal style featuring penguins and figures with penguin heads. When she came to sculpture in the 1980s, what she most appreciated was the resistance she felt as she worked, meaning that she ‘had to slow down’ and ‘be super careful’. Right from her first works as a sculptor, the stone was speaking to her, teaching her the value of stillness.

The stones with which she works still speak to her. The stone ‘tells me what it is willing to do’ and ‘lets me know exactly what it can and cannot do, and I work with that’. ‘The stone’, she says, ‘leads me through into this zone where we’re working together’. Ultimately, she says, ‘what I’m showing is that the relationship between a human and the planet can be very, very respectful, and very, very beautiful’. In this way, she uses the beauty, history, and energy of stone to connect people to the natural world.

Her respect for the stones is, in part, because she moves ‘through layers of history in the stones’. Because of their age, stones bring ‘messages to us from a time before culture’; ‘nature has been making stones’ for millions of years meaning that ‘they are from deep time’. This is the ‘stillness of stone compared to me as a short-lived human being’. Her work, therefore, involves ‘throwing something out there that is more enduring than soft humans’.

Her most recent exhibition was entitled ‘Comparative Stillness’. This title was chosen because the way the faces and the bodies she carves ‘always come out, there’s peacefulness there, there’s stillness’. ‘If you sit in this stillness of the stone’, she says, ‘you can find a great joy and a great peace’. She has asked herself, ‘What is it that I’m doing when I’m carving a human head out of stone?’ Her answer is that she is ‘finding an essential core of being alive that has in it, stillness’. ‘It’s the stillness that I’m after’, she says, and ‘out of that stillness come good actions.’ As a result, she says, ‘what I’m completely dedicated to now is to show that we do have access to that stillness and it could be our saving grace’. Everyone, she thinks, ‘should have quiet, kind symbols of internality around them’.

Describing her symbols, she says that: her discs are translucent, holding light within while symbolising the wholeness of the universe; her heads are never of particular people and are embodied consciousnesses with a sweetness to their closed eyes; and her torsos show the beauty and vulnerability of the female form which holds the capacity to create life.

The ‘quietness inherent in stone can also found in our consciousnesses’, which is why she speaks of her stone heads as ‘embodied consciousnesses’. She thinks that religion leads towards this same stillness and, therefore, thinks her art is doing a similar job to that which religion does, ‘trying to give value to people’s lives, what you can and can’t do’. Christ, she says, ‘is a particularly fine example of a teacher’. Her works ‘seem at home within the quietness of churches’ because ‘churches are places that have something of time, deep time’. She has made many sculptures for ecclesiastical settings, including St Paul’s Churchyard and Salisbury Cathedral, while exhibitions of her work have been held at St James Piccadilly and St Pancras New Church.

When I met her, she was in London for the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025. ‘Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations’ is a five-year project to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future. The project’s work is showcased to a public audience through major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.

This year’s lecture put Young in dialogue with US painter, Genesis Tramaine, an expressionist devotional painter deeply inspired by biblical texts. Like Young, Tramaine also creates monumental heads, and both speak of being led as they create their works; Young, by the stories in the stones, and Tramaine, by the Holy Spirit following prayer, worship and study of scripture. By being led in their work, both essentially agreed that, as Tramaine put it, you can't be present when creating, instead you ‘have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space’. Whether creating the heads of angels or of saints, both are depicting ‘messengers from heaven’.

The good actions that have arisen out of stillness for Young include a project to re-diversify the Maremma seabed in Casa dei Pesci. The seabed in this area, as also in many other places, is being destroyed through illegal fishing by dredger trawlers which destroy the seagrass meadows that are the breeding grounds for marine life. A local fisherman Paolo Fanciulli decided to address the problem by asking artists, including Young, to sculpt huge blocks of Carrara marble as, once these lie on the seabed, they make it impossible for the dredger trawlers to operate in the area. 29 sculptures, including four Stone Guardians by Young, form the Talamone Underwater Museum, which has seen ‘the trawlers go away’ and ‘the seabed diversify’ once again.

Young also creates large sculptures in the grounds of Convento di Santa Croce, the ruined monastery in Tuscany where she now lives. She says she has ‘been quiet’ and ‘become reclusive’ living there because the place itself is ‘really peaceful and quiet’ with a ‘handmade stillness to everything’. When the rains come, ‘bits of the steep hills fall away’ revealing ancient stones formed of volcanic materials, while caves which had fallen in on themselves have filled up with rainwater creating over time ‘a layered geology’. In this way in this area, ‘the earth is giving great stones to work with’.

In this delightful, giving place of stillness, she can sit quietly, prayerfully. She notes ‘how difficult it is to find a place of stillness today because of the ‘cacophony of distraction’ we all experience. Her aim is to show the way we are ‘wasting the gift of life’ and to reveal ‘our one consciousness’ in the stillness of stone.

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