Shakespeare did it in Hamlet – the device of a play within a play – actors playing actors to “hold the mirror up to Nature”.
SO 400 years later Alan Bennett uses the same trick in his masterly comedy about a meeting between poet W.H. Auden and composer Benjamin Britten.
But this is no cosy fireside biopic. Bitingly funny, it’s about unrequited love, betrayal, closet homosexuality and the very nature of the creative process.
So we find ourself at a rather ragged and fraught rehearsal for a young nervy playwright’s stage show. Two of the actors are missing; the director is away in Leeds and at least one major cast member is struggling with his lounges.
The play is about the historic meeting between Auden and Britten – but not really just about that.
Matthew Kelly, all woolly cardigan and early dementia as Auden, is a luvvie actor who can’t get to grips with the play’s meaning and its lack of poetry. It’s clear Bennett identifies with Auden, giving him the majority of the best lines.
Kelly is magnificent, dominating the first Act as a grumpy fish out of water playing a grumpy forgetful poet way past his best.
David Yelland is a sharp, waspish, stand-offish grandee as Britten, firmly in the closet but with a touchingly innocent passion for boys, which seems to have never led to anything criminal. It’s a highly nuanced performance, as Yelland wryly smiles his way through the embarrassing encounter with Auden – 30 years after they last met.
He is equally out of fashion and struggling with his final opus the opera Death in Venice – ironically about the unrequited love of an old man for a 14-year-old boy.
Philip Franks directs the show with great delicacy and warmth and no joke is allowed to die.
It’s telling that Bennett who had only “come out” to no-one’s surprised in 2005 wrote this play four years later .
Though he tries to give the young playwright character a bad play to present, he can’t really manage to be that third-rate, though there are some excruciating moments in the rehearsal.
And it gives Bennett full rein to analyse the creative process of writing and of acting. And the tension between writer and actor surfaces regularly. The play is also about compromising in life – the rent boy who denies it will be his profession for life, mirrored by one of the actors who has clearly been rent in his drama school days.
In the closing moments the wonderfully sensible and motherly stage manager, played brilliantly by Veronica Roberts speaks to us from Bennett’s heart. She reveals the terror of acting and the final realisation that it’s the play that is the most important thing in this acting business. Exactly as Hamlet said 400 year before “The play’s the thing.”
The Habit of Art is at the Theatre Royal, Brighton until Saturday, September 15 and then on tour.
Review by Brian Butler
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