Matthew Kelly (left) as W. H. Auden and Stephen Boxer (right) as Benjamin Britten meet after 30 years of estrangement, as Humphrey Carpenter (John Wark), who wrote biographies of both men, looks on in Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art.
The great poet W. H. Auden had notable success working on the stage—he collaborated on choral works and an opera with Benjamin Britten and on plays with Christopher Isherwood. But Auden as a character has had a lively theatrical life too. Paul Godfrey’s 1990 play Once in a While the Odd Thing Happens examined Britten’s friendship with Auden in the 1940s. In 2012 the Off-Broadway musical February House featured them living in Brooklyn in the early 1940s, in a house with Gypsy Rose Lee and Carson McCullers. And now comes Alan Bennett’s play The Habit of Art, written in 2009 but making its New York debut as part of Brits Off-Broadway. It shows a declining Auden meeting his old friend Britten after a 30-year estrangement.
Robert Mountford (left) plays the author Neil, Jessica Dennis is George (center), and Veronica Roberts is Kay, the stage manager.
A co-writer of the 1960 comedy revue Beyond the Fringe (and one of its original members, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller), Bennett uses a play-within-a-play structure. Weaving in and out among the actors and the characters in the play, he creates a tapestry of everyone who may have had a hand in the artistic process—even those at the fringe.
In a rehearsal room, actors gather to run through Caliban’s Day, about the two artistic lions meeting in Oxford in 1972 after Auden (Matthew Kelly, speaking with plummy-voiced authority) has returned from years living in New York. Britten (played with stiff-backed reserve by Stephen Boxer) is a nearby guest at Oxford, auditioning young choral singers. But the playwright Neil (Robert Mountford) has also included Humphrey Carpenter (John Wark), the eventual biographer of both Auden and Britten, as a Greek chorus—as well as talking furniture!
Auden and Britten discuss life and art in Bennett’s play.
Bennett, the author of Habeas Corpus (1973), The Madness of George III (1991), and The History Boys (2004), knows his way around the theater, and much of The Habit of Art is banter among the actors cast in Caliban’s Day. “Why is it that whoever’s got the smallest part is the one who brings in cakes to rehearsal?” asks Fitz (the one playing Auden). Replies Henry, the actor playing Britten: “Because they’re still human beings?” It’s familiar backstage drama—insular, dry and often witty, but rich in detail.
Fitz has a voice-over job to get to and a favorite toilet to use that nobody knows about. He’s also disgusted by Neil’s portrayal of Auden as “an odoriferous poet with a face like his balls.” Kay (Veronica Roberts), the efficient stage manager, drops tidbits about working with Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. She also describes an acting trick she observed in Alec Guinness (who starred in Habeas Corpus): “On one particular line he used to do a little flick of his leg. Cut to five years later when I worked with him again … different play, same flick.” It’s undoubtedly a detail that Bennett saw firsthand.
Wark’s Donald, who plays Carpenter, can’t understand why he’s on stage during the private Auden-Britten reunion and tries with comical clumsiness to enhance the part of Carpenter. And Benjamin Chandler’s Tim, who plays Stuart, a male prostitute hired by Auden, wants to know if he will be stripping naked in the rehearsal during the sex scene—because he’s ready.
Using a pared-down cast, director Philip Franks keeps the action clear, as Neil’s characters and the actors playing them toggle back and forth on Adrian Linford’s compact set, in which Britten’s piano room and Auden’s crummy digs sit inside the larger rehearsal space.
Kelly with Benjamin Chandler as Tim. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
Bennett shifts gears in Act II, as Britten comes to visit Auden and catch up on three decades apart. They bicker and talk about their lives and loves—their concealment or acknowledgment of their homosexuality, and faltering health. Britten has written his final opera, Death in Venice, and Auden mistakenly believes Britten wants him to help with the libretto. But Auden is also becoming forgetful and repeating himself, as Britten quickly realizes.
Amid all the characters in The Habit of Art, it’s Stuart who is accorded the most eloquent speech, staking his claim to be remembered:
When do we figure and get to say our say? The great men’s lives are neatly parceled for posterity, but what about us? When do we take our bow? … Because if nothing else, we at least contributed. We were in attendance, we boys of art. And though there’s the odd photograph, nobody remembers who they’re of: uncaptioned or “with an unidentified friend,” unnamed girls, unnameable boys, the flings, the tricks. The fodder of art.
Bennett’s bawdy, exhilarating tribute to the theater lovingly acknowledges the host of contributors, with their foibles and insecurities, who help make a work of art.
Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art runs through May 28 as part of Brits Off Broadway at 59E59 Theaters (59 E. 59th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit 59e59.org.
Playwright: Alan Bennett
Direction: Philip Franks
Sets & Costumes: Adrian Linford
Lighting: Johanna Town
Sound & Musical Arrangement: Max Pappenheim
