Review: The Habit of Art *****

The Habit of Art is about conversations that never took place – either between its writer Alan Bennett and its subjects poet WH Auden and composer Benjamin Britten, or between the two friends and Humphrey Carpenter, the man who was to write their biographies.
By The Newsroom
Published 12th Nov 2010, 15:08 BST
Updated 19th Nov 2010, 16:09 BST

This National Theatre production is also a play about plays, the angst of writers and actors, the horror of age and decrepitude and the point at which it's legal to admire youthful beauty.

All too much to tackle intelligibly in two hours and 20 minutes? You'd have thought so, but Bennett appears to be scaling new heights beyond the summit of The History Boys.

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It's 1972, and Auden has returned to Oxford, where he holds court in cafes, writes little and frets about who he has become. His former collaborator Britten visits, anxious for reassurance about his new opera Death in Venice, which centres on an older man's infatuation with a young boy.

The two characters feature in a play within the play, and are enveloped (but thankfully not smothered) by interruptions for prompts, arguments between actors and writer and general head-clutching. The stage manager's stroking of tender egos is masterly, as is the actors' cavalier attitude towards the writer.

Auden is a smelly, pontificating old man who pees in the sink and can bore for England. Yet he provokes sympathy in his acceptance that he is past his heyday and feels trapped by the sycophants who surround him in his creeping dessication. Beware becoming a National Treasure seems to be Bennett's sub-text – and he should know all about that.

This is AB at his most filthily effective and edgy, in a piece that is technically brilliant, wildly funny in places, and full of home truths. It's also beautifully acted.

Leeds Grand Theatre

To November 13. 0844 848 2700

Related topics:OxfordEngland