Bennett's The History Boys, a palpable hit for the National Theatre, was a hard act to follow, and at the age of 75, one wondered how much dramatic gas Bennett had in the tank, and whether he was still capable of delivering the goods.
The answer is a massive affirmative. Bennett's creative powers are as acute as they've always been, his wit just as sharp and his capacity to move an audience never stronger. With the possible exception of Tom Stoppard, he is the only contemporary dramatist whose work improves with age.
In The Habit of Art, which offers a Pirandellian-like play-within-a-play, the poet W.H. Auden (Richard Griffiths) and the composer Benjamin Britten (Alex Jennings), are fictitiously brought together in 1972, a year before Auden's death.
Though the pair had collaborated on several projects in the 1930s, the brittle Britten had taken offence at remarks Auden made about the composer's relationship with the singer Peter Pears, and acrimoniously ended their friendship – as he had done and would continue to do with many of his other friends and colleagues..
The play-within-the play, called "Caliban's Day," is being rehearsed in one of the National Theatre's rehearsal rooms. The director is elsewhere engaged that day, and Kay (Frances de la Tour), the stage manager, has ordered a run-through. So, initially, what we're being presented with is a play about putting on a play. The setting of "Caliban's Day" is Auden's rather squalid digs (courtesy of designer Bob Crowly) at Christ Church, Oxford, where, after he had become an American citizen in 1946, he returned as a verbose old bore, still scribbling away and as useful to the faculty as a sixth finger.
When we first meet him he has just confused the broadcaster Humphrey Carpenter who has come to interview him for Radio Oxford, for a rent boy he's been hoping to fellate. His next visitor is the rent boy himself, followed by Benjamin Britten, who's clutching the score of a work in progress, his new opera "Death in Venice."
Though it has been over 20 years since the two men met, Britten is concerned that the opera's subject – the obsession of an older man for a beautiful young boy – is too close to his own fondness for boys (though he never ever molested them), and that it might cause tongues to wag. He also has concerns over the quality of the libretto by his friend Myfanwy Piper.
Auden, who at this late stage in his life longs to be involved in a meaningful project, hopes Britten will ask him to take over the composition of the libretto. But all Briiten wants is advise.
Also present throughout the play-within-the play is Carpenter, who went on to write definitive biographies of both men, and who here serves as a kind of chorus probing and commenting on the action. If this structure sounds complicated, it isn't at all, and the play – which is both about the collaborative creative process in the theatre and the more personal process of writing poetry and music, artfully and fascinatingly moves from one to the other.
The toll taken by old age on the creative process is another vital element, as is the nature of biography, and what purpose, if any, it serves. The point is made that no mater how accomplished a biography might be, it is still secondary to the subject being written about.
Though most of the time Bennett brilliantly juggles all these elements, there is the occasional misfire. It is hard to believe, for example, that the writer (played with an agonised weariness by Elliot Levey) capable of writing the superb scenes between Auden and Britten would also write risibly parodic dialogue in rhyming couplets for inanimate objects such as Auden's door, his chair, his clock and even his craggy wrinkles! They belong in a different play and serve as little more than a device to garner a few unnecessary laughs.
Another devise.that struck me as mere contrivance was having Auden ask Britten (clearly for the benefit of the less informed members of the audience) to remind him what happens in Thomas Mann's novella "Death in Venice," when it is perfectly obvious he knows every detail of the plot intimately. Nor was I convinced by the arbitrary moments of forgetfulness and repetition with which Auden is suddenly inflicted in his scenes with Britten, as there was little, if any, evidence of this condition before.
Mere quibbles, though, far outweighed by the general excellence of the writing, by Nicholas Hytner's seamless, unobtrusive direction, and by the fine performances.
Griffiths, though nowhere resembling W.H. Auden, is wonderfully irascible and deeply moving as the spent poet who, even in old age, cannot quit the habit of art. Jennings as the prissy, more punctilious, envious and unsure of himself Britten (how tellingly he spits out the name of his rival Tippett) is excellent, as is Adrian Scarborough as Humphrey Carpenter. All three play dual roles, the insecure actors rehearsing Caliban's Day, and the characters they portray in it.
There's a lovely performance, too, from Frances de la Tour as Kay, the efficient, conciliatory seen-it-all-before stage manager, and from Stephen Wight playing the rent boy Stuart.
Towards the end of the play Bennett gives Stuart a speech that makes the point that, in writing about the lives of the great and the good, bit players like Stuart who are usually little more than a footnote to their lives, deserve recognition, too.
Bennett, however, ends this richly textured, multi-faceted, hugely entertaining play with a speech by Kay on the fear that actors feel in their jobs (during rehearsals of "Caliban's Day" the author remarks, "Plays don't so much go into production as into intensive care.") of the importance of plays in general and the National Theatre in particular.
Amen to that.
