A blog about why I love Alan Bennett and “The Habit of Art”
To celebrate Alan Bennett’s 76th birthday, my local cinema screened a live broadcast of his latest theatrical offering The Habit of Art, a high-definition cinema broadcast part of the National Theatre Live project. I should say from the outset that this was actually my second experience of the production, after having seen it performed live in London last December.
The Habit of Art reunites some of the major collaborators of Bennett’s runaway success The History Boys and subsequently doesn’t fail to disappoint us fans of Bennet. In some ways it’s an extension of the key themes, or perhaps a thematic sequel to The History Boys, by further examining the relationship between homosexuality, loneliness and relationships between older men and younger boys (this time through examined via Benjamin Britten’s relationships with adolescent boys and his fear of the audience’s reaction to him composing a truthful and authentic version of Death in Venice, an opera which deals with an ageing writers obsession with a young boy.)
We are left wondering if Bennett is saying that the act of older men having sex with teenage boys is not necessarily wrong, a somewhat fascinating argument, made more so by Bennet’s status as a “national living treasure”. It seems that Bennett can potentially examine issues in a very mainstream theatre environment (in this case the National Theatre) that other playwrights would be lampooned and potentially hung for in the mainstream British Tabloid Press. Bennett is daring in the concepts he examines and what he potentially does and doesn’t say in his writing.
In The Habit of Art we witness a rehearsal of an imagined theatre production in which a company of National Theatre actors are rehearsing. The production centres on an encounter in which an elderly W.H. Auden (Richard Griffiths) meets Benjamin Britten (Alex Jennings) in an imagined encounter, in the twilight of their respective years. All of this action is narrated and recalled by Humphrey Carpenter (Adrian Sarborough), a broadcaster who later goes on to write the biographies of the two great artists.
The director is absent from rehearsal, unfortunately stuck at a conference in Leeds (an obvious in-house jibe at the National Theatre Artistic Director Nicholas Hytner), and the stage manager Kay (Frances de la tour) leads a much-needed afternoon run-through, as the writer Neil (Elliot Levey) arrives to observe the proceedings.
For those of who have ever directed a theatre production or simply observed a rehearsal in progress, it’s all an absolute joy from beginning to end. Alan Bennett captures all the dynamics of a rehearsal room: the tension, politics, fractured personal relationships, the actors struggles with the dramatic process of creating fully rounded characters, the remembering and forgetting of lines and the social order of cast and crew. This is all managed by Frances de la Tour, the stage manager who spends a great deal of the play humoring the actors and their respective egos.
But above this it’s also a play about the voyeuristic nature of biography, the artistic process and the nature of creativity, the differences between public and private lives, the role of theatre and the role of the National Theatre.
There has been some conjecture as to Bennett’s use of the “play-within-a-play” device. The New York Times reviewer described it “less a play than notes for one.” This is nonsense. Bennet uses this device as a platform to celebrate and unpack the very notion of collaboration and the artistic process. It makes perfect sense when you consider the notion of the habit of art. Through the choice of Calliaban, Bennet reminds us that someone or something is always left out. That is the process of writing a play, a poem or creating art. It can’t be all things. It is the product of flawed human beings.
In the moving conclusion Kay suggests that the National’s Cottesloe Theatre should be converted into a “Billiard Hall” and plunged of culture and after twenty years “when it’s shabby and run-down and been purged of culture,” then it should casually return to playing theatre.
“Plays plymp, plays paltry, play preposterous, plays purgatorial, plays radiant, plays rotten – but plays persistent. Plays, plays, plays.”
Why do I love Bennett? Because he dares to make arguments, sometimes painfully personal, all which matter deeply to him. In The Habit of Art, he writes about love, art and politics. Almost every line is a miniature argument of epic intellectual proportions. But that shouldn’t scare you. He is funny, accessible and brilliantly honest. My only hope is that I have the habit of art for nearly as long and nearly as passionately as Bennett.
