Choral by Alan Bennett

You don’t have to believe it. I always took the Matthew Passion with a pinch of salt.

Ramsden, Yorkshire, 1916. The ambitious local Choral Society is depleted as men volunteer for the front and plans for their St Matthew Passion by German composer J. S. Bach are scuppered by patriotic fervour. Dr Guthrie, the mysterious, exacting new Chorus Master, finds a replacement in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius and swells the choir’s numbers with teenage boys and girls. Together they discover the urgency of desire and the joy of singing as the new boys come to terms with their imminent conscription, and friendships and summer trysts are suffused with a melancholy sense of all that might soon be lost.

The screenplay will be published alongside the film’s AUSTRALIAN release (on 1st January 2026) and includes a preface by the author and an introduction from Nicholas Hytner.

Alan Bennett’s first original screenplay in twenty years: a poignant, bittersweet comedy about a Yorkshire village’s local choral society during the First World War.

About the Author: Alan Bennett’s works for stage and screen include Talking Heads, Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, A Question of Attribution, The Madness of George III, an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, The History Boys, The Habit of Art, People, Hymn, Cocktail Sticks, Two Besides and Allelujah! Prose collections are Writing Home, Untold Stories (PEN/Ackerley Prize, 2006) and Keeping On Keeping On. Other work includes The Uncommon Reader, Smut: Two Unseemly Stories and recent Sunday Times bestsellers, House Arrest (his pandemic diaries) and the novella Killing Time.

23 Oct 2025
 

The Choral by Alan Bennett ISBN 9780571396283