Double vision | 25 November 2009

The Habit of Art
Lyttelton

Cock
Royal Court Upstairs

Here’s my theory. Alan Bennett alighted on Auden and Britten as a promising theme. Two interesting old poofs collaborating on an opera shortly before their deaths. The first draft turned out to be static, chat-heavy and lacking in dramatic movement. Start again. Write a play about a company of actors rehearsing the Auden/Britten play. That’s better. That loosens things up. It adds gags. It adds layers, too. If we get bored with Auden and Britten we can watch the actors break character and make comments, discuss historical details and complain about the sorts of things actors complain about.

The chap playing Auden’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, wants to beef up his role so he begs the writer to give him a cameo as a cross-dressing tuba player. That’s funny, sort of. There are better gags. At their first meeting at his Christ Church rooms, Auden mistakes Carpenter for a male prostitute. ‘I’m not a rent boy,’ huffs Carpenter, ‘I was at Keble.’ But the bifocal approach has drawbacks. It’s unclear whether the main character is Auden or the actor, Fitz, who impersonates him. Britten scarcely gets a look-in. He enters late and is played for laughs as a vain, confused, buttoned-up prig struggling to master his passion for choirboys. Bennett shows very little interest in his music at all.

The picture of Auden is fuller but still incomplete, an Augustus John rather than a Holbein. He’s a shambolic sophisticate, a compulsive talker, a wordsmith with touches of the hack about him searching for a subject, any subject, on which he can shower his surfeit of ability. That description applies equally well, I suspect, to Bennett. Richard Griffiths precisely captures Auden’s weary warmth and erudite melancholy.