More Plays and Shows
Back ◄   ► Next
THE HABIT OF ART
by Alan Bennett
Venue: RNT Lyttelton 2010
via feed to
Leighton Buzzard Theatre 2013
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W.H. Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first in twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by, among others, their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station. Alan Bennett's play is as much about the theatre as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion's spent: ultimately, on the habit of art.
Cast
Fitz (WH Auden)
 Richard Griffiths
Henry (Benjamin Britten)
 Alex Jennings
Donald (Humphrey Carpenter)
 Adrian Scarborough
Tim (Stuart)
 Stephen Wight
Charlie (Boy Treble)
 Laurence Belcher
Brian (Boyle)
Philip Childs
Neil (Author)
 Elliot Levey
Kay (Stage Manager)
 Frances de la Tour
George (ASM)
 John Heffernan
Joan (Chaperone)
 Barbara Kirby
Matt (Sound)
 Danny Burns
Ralph (Dresser)
 Martin Chamberlain
Tom (Rehearsal Pianist)
 Tom Attwood



Richard Griffiths, Adrian Scarborough, Alex Jennings

Reviews

The Times

Alan Bennett's new play, The Habit of Art, is based on an imaginary meeting between the former collaborators Benjamin Britten and WH Auden in Oxford in the early 1970s. To get round the perennial problem of how to avoid too much exposition - too much Britten and Auden telling each other things that they would already know, but we don't - Bennett has framed the whole thing as a play within a play. So we have Richard Griffiths playing an actor called Fitz playing Auden, and Alex Jennings playing Henry playing Britten, with a whole troupe of directors, props people, extras and even the biographer Humphrey Carpenter on hand to comment, interrupt and explain.

Adrian Scarborough plays the actor playing Carpenter himself in a typically winning, indignant-little-man performance, the biographer like a nasty creeping weed in a field of tall poppies. Such a portrait is not remotely like the real-life Humphrey Carpenter, it should be pointed out. At one point, the actor realises that he is merely a "device", and almost crumples to the ground under the weight of his poor bruised ego. Bennett portrays actors here as much like children, only somewhat less mature, perceptive and self-aware. But his handling of the framing device in general tells you almost everything about Bennett's particular talent. It's deft, amusing, and so intelligently and generously crafted that it makes you feel clever just watching it. At the same time, it's completely lacking in the kind of political subversiveness that Brecht got out of his theatrical games, let alone the existential dizziness and disturbance of Pirandello. Nevertheless, Bennett gets a great deal of fun out of it - as do we.

The characterisation of Auden, in particular, is wonderful. He lives in the kind of domestic squalor that would shame a bunch of first-year students. He smells quite distinctive, with his perpetual cigarettes and his "elephantine, urine-stained trousers". Griffiths, typically and startlingly, pronounces "urine" here to rhyme with wine, not win, which is much funnier, for reasons difficult to explain. He mixes crude martinis in a water jug with a pencil, and pees in the sink. He also talks with the ceaseless eloquence and range of a Wilde or a Coleridge, a man of great heart as well as talent. Despite the personal-hygiene problems, he is an enormously appealing figure, and Griffiths plays him beautifully.

Considerably less appealing is the respectable, passionless and buttoned-up Britten, firmly stuck in his own boyhood, lacking the guts to be gay, and coldly dropping old friends at the slightest offence. But at least Britten is genuinely troubled by his attraction to young boys, in marked contrast to the rather blithe portrayal of boy-love in The History Boys. Bennett has said he identifies far more with Britten than with Auden. At one point, the composer describes bitterly how he will always be perceived by his ad­mirers as "the loveable, talented little boy". For all Bennett's modesty and love of reticence - and deep understanding of the power of reticence - you can surely hear his voice at this point.

The Habit of Art is a richly thought-provoking piece about many things, including artistic creation, the vulgarity of biography, sexuality, friendship, the bubble of reputation, but it also has an intriguingly autobiographical feel at times. What sort of artist have I been? Will anything survive? At one point, someone reports to Auden that Professor Tolkien is writing a new book. "More fucking elves, I suppose?" mutters Auden. A straight steal of a real-life comment by Professor Hugh Dyson, who was heard to mutter at an early reading of The Lord of the Rings: "Not another fucking elf!" Despite this, though, the real Auden was, in fact, a huge fan, not least because it so often echoed the ancient Norse sagas he loved. Monstrous oddity though it is, The Lord of the Rings will surely still be read and loved long after Bennett, and even Auden, are.

Nicholas Hytner's direction is a perfect match for Bennett's charm here, and the performances are a treat. Frances de la Tour as Kay the stage manager is hilarious, for ever having to reassure her actors, to soothe their little tantrums and wipe away their tears. The only real weakness in the piece is the introduction of a rent boy called Stuart, an unconvincing shovelling of A Sympathetic Member of the Working Classes into these cosy proceedings, to make some point about inequality, social injustice and so forth. It's all as woolly as a Marks & Spencer cardie.

There is more Brecht-lite debate at the end about what the ending should actually be. Should it be Auden's own magnificent In Memory of WB Yeats, with its ringing last lines, "In the prison of his days, Teach the free man how to praise"? We are also offered an alternative, highly implausible ending, in which Stuart, visiting Auden, yearns bitterly and eloquently for this middle-class thing called "culture", which he has glimpsed on his visits to clients in leafy north Oxford - a world of books and paintings a long way from the down-at-heel bus station where he usually earns a living.

But another line of Auden's stands out, a throwaway remark of benign and careless philistinism, pleasantly bracing after all this anxiety about artistic achievement: "In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things in life are earning one's living and loving one's neighbours."

*   *   *   *   *

Daily Telegraph
It seems entirely impossible, but Alan Bennett, that most cherished of national treasures, is now 75. There is absolutely no evidence, however, of flagging powers. I thought it unlikely that he would be able to equal the success of The History Boys (2004) but The Habit of Art is another absolute cracker, often wonderfully and sometimes filthily funny (this is not a show for the prudish), but also deeply and unexpectedly moving. It is a play about theatre itself, about poetry and music, about the ethics of biography, and the terrors of age, but the older he gets, the more daring and ambitious Bennett seems to become. There is a confidence here, a sense of a writer pushing himself to the limits and not giving a damn about the consequences, that is hugely invigorating.

The central characters are WH Auden and Benjamin Britten. Auden, now a bossy old bore has returned to Oxford in 1972, just a year before his death. Britten, meanwhile, seeks out his former collaborator as he is anxious about his opera, Death in Venice, a dangerously near-the-knuckle subject since it concerns an older man’s infatuation with a young boy — and Britten loved boys, though he was no kiddie fiddler. Yet what we see is a play about the two being rehearsed by actors. The scenes are constantly interrupted by prompts and arguments, by the actors agonising about their roles and the stage manager soothing the hilariously insecure cast. In lesser hands the framing device might have become more interesting than the story of Auden and Britten. With extraordinary panache, however, Bennett and his director Nicholas Hytner, keep us equally interested in both the rehearsal process and the portrait of Auden and Britten.

Initially it looks as though Bennett is doing something of a hatchet job on Auden, who has such nasty habits as peeing in the sink and confusing respectable men from the BBC with the rent boys he pays to fellate. Yet somehow Richard Griffiths makes you care about Auden’s frailty and dried up talent while also playing an actor who can’t remember his lines and hates the way Auden is presented. Alex Jennings is superb, too, as the pained, prissily fastidious Britten and as a college scout grumbling about the squalor of Auden’s room, while Frances de la Tour, as the stage manager, and Adrian Scarborough, as the biographer Humphrey Carpenter, give performances of comic perfection. I can think of few plays that combine wild laughter, deep emotion and technical ingenuity with such bravura. The Habit of Art is a smash hit if I ever saw one.

*   *   *   *   *

The Guardian
Artists in their late work often feel free to digress and experiment. Alan Bennett takes full advantage of this licence in a multi-levelled work that deals with sex, death, creativity, biography and much else besides. And, while it may not possess the universal resonance of The History Boys, The Habit of Art has the characteristic Bennett mix of wit and wistfulness.

The structure is certainly complex. We are watching a rehearsal, in the National Theatre itself, of a play called Caliban's Day: one that, inspired by Auden's The Sea and the Mirror, gives voice to the unregarded. The setting, however, is the cluttered Christ Church lodging of Auden himself in his twilit 1972 days. In the first half we see the poet being interviewed by his future biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, who is initially mistaken for a rent boy. And in the second, far superior, part we watch an imagined encounter between Auden and Benjamin Britten. If one adds that Carpenter steps out of the action to become a choric commentator and that the actors constantly question the on-stage author about his text, it will be seen that the play has enough layers to make Pirandello blanch. At times, there is so much scaffolding you can't always see the main property. And, although Bennett seems to endorse Auden's point that "a lot of what is passed off as biography is idle curiosity," he is not above indulging our appetite for gossip about Auden's insistence on sexual punctuality. There is also a hint of sentimentality in Bennett's claim that figures such as the rent boy are marginalised when great men's lives are parcelled out for posterity: it seems especially untrue in the case of Britten when books have been devoted to his relationships.

But Bennett's play is at its strongest when it deals with the theme implicit in its title: the idea that, for the artist, creativity is a constant, if troubling imperative. We see this in the beautifully written encounter between Britten and Auden. Temperamentally, the two men could hardly be more different: the one a model of restraint, the other an apostle of sexual freedom and something of an intellectual bully. But Britten's anxieties about Death in Venice, and his fear that it may be an act of self-revelation, are movingly countered by Auden's desperate desire to be involved in the libretto. It never happened; but it acquires an imaginative plausibility and shows two great artists, towards the end of their lives, united in their belief in the power of the creative impulse. As Auden himself says, "what matters is the work".

A play that could easily seem tricksy is also given a superbly fluid production by Nicholas Hytner and is beautifully acted. Richard Griffiths bears no physical resemblance to Auden but he becomes a vivid metaphor for the poet. At the same time, Griffiths reminds us of the tetchy actor who is simply playing a role. Alex Jennings offers an equally potent echo of the angst-ridden Britten, spitting out the name of "Tippett" with calculated asperity. Adrian Scarborough as Carpenter and Frances de la Tour as the stage manager are no less magnetic. The latter has a speech about the parade of plays that have given the National Theatre a weathered use that eloquently epitomises the basic theme of Bennett's deeply moving play: the ennobling power, in art, of sheer diurnal persistence.
*   *   *   *   *

The Observer
WH Auden, the Oxford oracle, is peeing into his washbasin. He's waiting for a rent boy to arrive in his college rooms; he's stuck over his stanzas; he looks not so much like a bag person as a crumpled plastic bag. A floor above him, Benjamin Britten, sleek as a whippet, is at the piano, with poker back and pumping arms, cajoling a young treble into song: "Oh lift your little pinkie!… It's meant to sound horrid. This is modern music." Set in a rehearsal room, watched over by a playwright, observed and explained by a biographer of both Britten and Auden, Alan Bennett's imagined late meeting between composer and poet has inverted commas around every invert. It's a gloriously sustained, constantly shifting piece of irony. Irony doesn't, of course, preclude pathos. After The History Boys, The Musical Men.

Bob Crowley's clever, messy, open-to-the-backstage design is, as is everything in Nicholas Hytner's fleet production, at least two things at once: a set within a set for a play within a play. Richard Griffiths comes on dying for one twice over: as the actor playing the poet, anxious to get off and do his voiceover for Tesco, he's desperate for a cigarette; as the candid, repetitive, smelly old Auden, he is longing for the rent boy. Alex Jennings is trim and buttoned-up as Britten; as the actor who plays the composer, he is lissome, arch and knowing.

Both Griffiths and Jennings are terrific, though neither of them is particularly like the famous men they play: they are actors not impersonators. Michael Gambon, originally down to play Auden, was jowl-casting. Griffiths, who stepped in when Gambon was taken ill, doesn't have those lugubrious dewlaps: he's dishevelled but dainty, both swarmingly anxious and buoyantly breezy. The non-resemblance becomes one of the points and jokes of the play. History and biographers can't get it right, Bennett implies, and to rub it in he makes his commentating biographer spectacularly unlike the real-life model. Adrian Scarborough's Humphrey Carpenter is a beaky, neat, plaintive chap. Carpenter was exactly not like that: apparently bumbling, actually ultra-industrious, his default mode was affability rather than querulousness; he would never have carried such a spruce satchel – he used rather to heave his many manuscripts around in multiple plastic bags. He explained that he had to work in radio rather than telly because "I always come out looking like everyone's mad aunt".

The dissimilarity is outed by an actor who carps that the real Humph was handsome. The Scarborough Humph, wheeled on to fill in biographical details and explain what's true and what's not, has another complaint. "I'm just a device," he sobs. He's right. Bennett's play is full of devices and intricate ploys. The meeting between Britten and Auden is encircled by wonderfully comic dramatic tosh. Tables, mirrors, even the creases on Auden's face are personified, and mimed to the accompaniment of silvery chimes. John Heffernan, as an assistant stage manager stepping up to fill a vacant acting spot, is particularly droll as he manfully, sceptically, assumes the part of a talking chair.

It's striking that, despite all its sardonic surroundings, the central encounter – which touches on broken friendships, Thomas Mann, coming out of the closet, boys, and the grim necessity of continuing to write – still registers as moving and true. It has, of course, a history behind it: The Habit of Art takes off from Bennett's earlier work both in its preoccupations and in its casting (Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour). It's not a sequel to The History Boys, which since it triumphed at the National five years ago has spun across the Atlantic and into celluloid. Still, there are notable overlaps: the teacher who fumbled his pupils was looked on with indulgence in that play; here, faced with Britten's sexual primness as he composes Death in Venice, Auden suggests that some sexual liaisons between older men and boys might be better called not corruption but collaboration. Oxford (which National theatre audiences will know is not a town but a university) looms large. And the difficulty of being a writer's biographer was first floated by Bennett more than 20 years ago in Kafka's Dick.

Actually, though, the lure of a Bennett play doesn't lie in historical themes; it comes from sentences, riffs and free-standing blasts. Audiences go to hear not just his voice, ventriloquised through his characters, but his views. Bennett has just as many arguments and ideas as David Hare, though they aren't honed and sequential. The structure is precarious, sometimes ramshackle as it skips from scene to scene. But that ricketiness ceases to matter when it is engulfed by a tsunami of jokes, a tidal wave of argumentative statements, a gorgeous gust of opinion.

Which attracts first-rate performances. Stephen Wight as the rent boy for one. And Frances de la Tour for the other. As the stage manager who has to run the show, her nonchalant, sceptical intelligence rolls through the play, as it did in The History Boys. She can suggest without saying a word both determination and depression. She does so with a drop in her mellifluousness, but also with a slight curve of her long spine: she bends as if she's just been socked in the back with some slightly familiar bit of bad news. No one has ever made "Love you" sound so completely lowering. No one has ever made lowering sound so funny.

*   *   *   *   *

Daily Mail

Alan Bennett, being English, hates to be too ‘artsy’ and instead wraps serious subjects in layers of comedy. He is at it again with his latest play, which is satirical, serious and self-indulgent, sometimes all at the same time. The Habit of Art has as many creamy layers as a Danish slice.

First, it is a play rehearsal within a play. The setting is a back room at the National Theatre – yes, the very same establishment where this show opened last night. Richard Griffiths and his spare tyres play a waspish old actor who is playing W.H. Auden towards the end of his life. That tummy doesn’t half wobble these days. Sorry, but it does. Mr Griffiths is a fine actor – hits the letter ‘t’ beautifully – but his bulk is now a fatal distraction. We are also introduced to Auden’s former friend Benjamin Britten (Alex Jennings, nicely queeny). Frances de la Tour does a lovely turn as a laconic stage manager. The play being rehearsed before our eyes begins as a pseudy horror – just the sort of thing, ahem, that we have had all too often in recent years at this address.  A knowing line about video installations received a particularly grateful growl of recognition from last night’s audience (big luvvie contingent). There are various other theatrical ‘in’ jokes. Good fun, but of limited appeal. Mr Bennett may feel he has deserved a chance to be skittish and he may be right. He is on more familiar droll form as he sketches Auden’s existence at Oxford University, thrown-away sadness detectable amid the provincial argot of working-class stereotypes and the air of human decline. One of the layers of his Danish slice is the contempt thespians have for playwrights. Elliot Levey is excellent as the pretentious author of the Auden/Britten play, mouthing the lines as he watches the rehearsals. The bad language and gags about men’s appendages become a little tiresome after the first hour. By that point Mr Bennett has hit the more serious (and interesting) question of Auden’s reaction to Britten’s success. He both mocks and envies Britten’s respectability, his self-restraint, his material prosperity. Shorn of the Bennettesque larking about, that might have made a better play, even if it might not have given a willing audience so many throaty laughs.