Auden and Britten in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art

Alan Bennett has written a complex new play, directed again by Nicholas Hytner, about an imagined late life meeting between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten adapting Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. (If you're counting, that = gay x 6.) According to the critic for the Times of London, "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?"

Put another way, the Guardian's "What To Say" column said, "Gay creative types moan about getting old."

The Hollywood Reporter summarizes the play within a play structure:

The setting is one day in the rehearsal at the National Theater of a play titled "Caliban's Day," based on a poem called "The Sea and the Mirror" by W.H. Auden. The author, Neil (Elliot Levey), is on hand as stage manager Kay (Frances de la Tour) oversees a run-through.

Richard Griffiths is Fitz, somewhat reluctantly playing Auden, with Alex Jennings as Henry, who is cast as British composer Benjamin Britten. The play within the play deals with the friendship between the two men, both noted homosexuals, and a fictitious reunion late in life.

Britten is grappling with an opera based on Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" and having trouble with the libretto. He doesn't ask Auden outright to write it, but the poet jumps at the chance. The encounter, though, is a kind of audition as the two men's conversation roams over their respective approaches to art and their private natures. There is also an important interruption by a young rent boy named Stuart (Stephen Wight), who shows up for a sex appointment with Auden.

Also in the play within the play is another real-life character, Humphrey Carpenter, who wrote biographies of the two accomplished figures and is used as a kind of voice-over. Bennett has great fun in the back-and-forth between Donald, the actor cast as Carpenter, played by Adrian Scarborough, and the playwright about the purpose of such a device. He also draws many laughs from interplay among the author, the stage manager and the actors.

This is yet another of Bennett's works to star The History Boys' Richard Griffiths who, the NYT critic says, gives "the performance of his career." In the Telegraph, Charles Spencer considers the play, "A smash hit if ever I saw one." The Independent gives it five stars. The Guardian notes, Bennett "has proved that there are big audiences out there for complicated dramas about clever dead people discussing things – provided that they pause from time to time for an archly crafted gag."

As for the 75 year old Bennett's own habit of art, he writes about writing his play in the London Review of Books.

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