Off-Broadway Play Review—“The Habit of Art” by Alan Bennett

The Habit of Art

Written by Alan Bennett; directed by Philip Franks

Performances through May 28, 2023

59e59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY

59e59.org

Matthew Kelly, John Wark and Stephen Boxer in The Habit of Art (photo: Carol Rosegg)

In the theater of Alan Bennett, the playful interacts with the dreadfully serious. The Madness of George III found high comedy and tear-stained tragedy in the mental disintegration of the British king who lost the Revolution war to the upstart American colonies. The History Boys was both hilarious and thoughtful in its depiction of the relationship between a group of students and their magnetic professor. And his 2009 play, The Habit of Art, explores the flawed genius of composer Benjamin Britten (Stephen Boxer) and poet W.H. Auden (Matthew Kelly) through the prism of their posthumous biographer and the interactions of actors rehearsing a play about both men, who had known proclivities for underage boys (Britten) and “rent boys” (Auden).

In a small theater, a group of actors is set to rehearse Caliban’s Day, a play about Britten and Auden (the title based on Auden's belief that The Tempest needed an epilogue), in front of its beleaguered author, Neil (Robert Mountford), but not the director, who’s busy somewhere else. As they start rehearsing, the performers comment on the characters’ interactions, often questioning Neil about why something was included or not, and he responds with an interjection of facts that ingenuously allows Bennett to slip his own commentary about Britten and Auden into the proceedings, including the title of Bennett’s own play.

“The habit of art” is intoned twice by Auden and again at the end by Kay (Veronica Roberts), the stage manager who has seen it all and acts as a surrogate director. “The habit of art” first sounds like a pejorative, like something one needs to stop doing, like smoking, drinking—or having an interest in underage or “rent” boys. But for Bennett—and, obviously, for Auden and Britten—it is instead nurturing, life-affirming, necessary.

Bennet—who knows that their homosexuality was of great importance to both men’s art, with Britten adapting Thomas Mann’s latently queer novella Death in Venice as his new opera—conjures a fictional meeting between the estranged friends after many years, just as Britten embarks on composing Venice from a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, who worked with Britten earlier on the operas The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave. (Britten had earlier set several Auden texts to music in several song cycles, the 1941 folk opera Paul Bunyan and, lastly, the 1944 choral work Hymn to St. Cecilia.)  

Auden, ever the savage wit, tells Britten upon his arrival at Auden’s rundown flat—which is where the poet meets his rent boys for quick trysts—that he (Auden) should write the libretto since he is more sympathetic to Mann’s closeted homosexual tendencies than the heterosexual Piper, especially since Mann was once his father-in-law. (Auden and Mann’s daughter had had a marriage of convenience years ago.) 

Britten feels Piper is up to the librettist’s job but he wants Auden to help make the opera—about an older artist with a secret yearning for young boys—less overtly autobiographical. Auden disagrees: “The closer you can steer it to yourself the better it will be.” The dialogue between the two men is imagined with precision and observed with sympathy by Bennett, who allows the men to speak frankly about themselves, often laced with biting humor. Discussing the youngster Tadzio in Death in Venice, whom Britten wants to age by a few years to make the relationship more palatable for audiences, Auden dryly says, “The boy Thomas Mann saw and took a fancy to was 11. Mann wrote him up as being 14. Now you’re suggesting 16. At this rate he’ll soon be drawing a pension.”

Hovering over this imagined meeting of the minds is the play-within-the-play’s narrator, Humphrey Carpenter (John Wark), who went on to write biographies of both Auden and Britten (as well as notables such as J.R.R. Tolkien) after their deaths. Humphrey, a conduit for some of Bennett’s illuminating observations about creativity and artistry, opens the play with these fitting lines: “I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men, their fears and their failings. I’ve had enough of their vision, how they altered the landscape. We stand on their shoulders to survey our lives.”

Philip Franks’ exuberant staging originated at the Original Theatre for a 2018 London revival and was supposed to make the trip over as part of 59E59’s Brits Off Broadway in 2020, but that was obviously canceled by the pandemic. It has finally arrived, and it couldn’t be bettered. The actors, who brilliantly speak Bennett’s magnificently quotable dialogue, are perfection, both individually and as an ensemble, with Matthew Kelly’s mordantly hilarious Auden and Veronica Roberts’ acidly amusing Kay leading the way. 

Johanna Town’s magisterial lighting and Adrian Linford’s lovely scattered set that combines the cramped rehearsal stage and Auden’s cluttered flat—with such visual touchstones as an LP of a Vaughan Williams symphony conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham casually leaning against a turntable—also contribute mightily to the masterly effect of The Habit of Art, in which Alan Bennett once again shows he has few playwriting equals.