The Habit of Art

Alan Bennett is a national treasure as well as the National's - 'The History Boys', directed by Nicholas Hytner, made £5 million over four years for the theatre. His new play is, among many other things, a teasing tribute to this very stage and it's hard to imagine any other theatre pulling off. It's a play within a play in which a clunky drama about an imaginary meeting between one-time collaborators Benjamin Britten and WH Auden is being rehearsed by some wonderful actors at the National.

Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths (she the stage manager, he the celebrated actor Fitz who is playing Auden) do indeed pleasure us with wonderful skill. In the bio-drama, Auden is initially sketched as a shockingly candid old cocksucker (visited in turn by Adrian Scarborough's earnest biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, Stephen Wight's chirpy rent boy and Alex Jennings's prim, rectitudinous Britten, increasingly excellent foils). Griffiths fleshes the poet out with a cuddly humanism of near-spherical dimensions: once he settles into Auden's squalid Oxford study, the dry fragments of both plays are drawn together in his benign influence. De la Tour, too, milks her slight role as mother figure to the luvvies and the play's onstage author: her sympathy is so boundless that she both ennobles and makes a mockery of all their trivial vanities; her face falls like a tragic soufflé at the slightest indignation.

Sympathy - the essence of an actor's craft or areader's interest - is exposed as one of art's dirty habits. Bennett's play is wrapped in layer upon layer of intelligent anxiety about what a grubby, knicker-sniffing business an artist's interest can be, especially in the form of spurning one's disused muses with a faithless arm (Auden and Britten) or (nearer the knuckle), biographical speculation about a writer's life. Without the witty and perceptive direction of Hytner, itself a triumph of imaginative understanding, 'The Habit of Art' could easily have collapsed under its own conscience.

In the shifts between the two sketchy plays, our curiosity about Auden and Britten is racked and frustrated. Instead, Bennett makes their biographer Carpenter the butt of a pointed joke when the elderly poet mistakes him for a male prostitute. Revealingly, those bits of the Britten/Auden play which are most obviously written by the onstage author are puerile doggerel. The joke's on everyone: when the play belatedly ripens into the fantasy showdown between Britten and Auden that we came to see, the many themes of their conversation point back to Bennett's own increasingly frank autobiographical writings: coming out of the closet; the unacknowledged role of the boy-muse in the production of art; guilt and innocence; revisionism; the life of fiction and the fiction of life. Bennett fans should enjoy the literary frisson, the theatrical cosiness, and the intellectual honesty. But this post-modern postscript to great lives in writing lacks the solidity and acutely observed sympathy for the little man that made us treasure him in the first place.