Review Theatre: The Habit Of Art | WH Auden | Benjamin Britten | Alan Bennett | Michael Gambon | Richard Griffiths

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The Review - THEATRE by SIMON WROE
Published: 4 December 2009

Richard Griffiths in The Habit Of Art

Bennett’s dissection of dark poetic heart

THE HABIT OF ART
National theatre

ALTHOUGH raiding the crypts of our literary greats is nothing new, there are always some surprises.
Biographical dramatists tend towards the monument or the hatchet, and they always leave their footprints in the dust.
With Orton and Keats freshly exhumed and playing at a theatre near you, it is now the turn of WH Auden – a poet one would describe as “a national treasure” in spite of his wayward definitions of hygiene and outspoken proclivity for rent boys – and the composer Benjamin Britten.
Alan Bennett, another writer referred to as state-owned plunder, imagines the two dying men meeting in Auden’s chaotic Oxford flat in the early 1970s as Britten writes his last opera.
Auden wrote that “art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead” and this is how Bennett employs it here.
The Habit of Art could be seen as a truth and reconciliation hearing for poetry and its darker urges.
The millstone of talent weighs heavy, yet heavier still is the social burden of homosexuality. Ill health forced Michael Gambon to relinquish the role of Auden to Richard Griffiths, but the substitution is fitting given the play’s (often ribald) content. Auden now comes by way of Uncle Monty in Withnail and I.
Bennett has written the play within a play, with a team of fictional stagehands interrupting a run-through of an ungainly drama.
Art is cruel, the play claims; it casts loved ones out and refuses entry to the unknowing. Bennett, who has spoken of the exclusion he felt at Oxford, rails against this but tacitly accepts it.
Life crumbles and fades; genius lives forever.
Until March 1
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