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

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

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

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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