The Habit of Art

Last week we were very excited to be in the audience for The Habit of Art, the new play by Alan Bennett, during its short run at Birmingham Rep. There was a full house on Saturday night, and the audience seemed to be buzzing with anticipation.

The play has had mostly excellent reviews since it opened at the National Theatre in November 2009 – and it is a play which is deeply rooted in the National Theatre, being constructed as a rehearsal of a play at the NT. This play-within-a-play tells of a fictional meeting between Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, in Oxford, when Auden was “retired” in a house at the back of Christchurch, and Britten was in the throes of writing Death in Venice. This is a meeting of writer and composer, but it is much, much more than that.  It explores the nature of biography, since a character of the play-within-a-play is Humphrey Carpenter, biographer of both Britten and Auden. The play offers the audience a chance to consider the nature of biography: do we actually want to know what someone was really like? Does a writer’s personality affect how we read his poems, for example?

Auden and Britten are both difficult subjects for biography: not always likeable, there are aspects of their lives (Auden’s somewhat seedy sex life, for example, and Britten’s unsavoury relationships with young pupils) which admirers of their work might prefer not to know.  They are, this play suggests, great figures nonetheless; Bennett suggests in the writing of this play, as the figure of Carpenter also does, that they are figures who have remade the landscape of British culture, and cannot be ignored, even if their personal lives do not necessarily repay close scrutiny.

The play raises a number of other questions I could discuss: the transience of youth and enduring-ness of old age; the writing of poetry and music; the nature of theatre. I will restrain myself; do see this play while it is touring; Alan Bennett never disappoints, and this production, thought-provoking and engrossing, is a satisfying experience.

Enjoy

Enjoy, one of Alan Bennett’s earlier plays, wasn’t well-received when it was first staged in 1980 with Joan Plowright; audiences and critics felt it was too long and, Bennett says, missed the point. Luckily it has now been revived and revised, in a new shorter version with Alison Steadman which is currently touring, and The Guardian gave this five well-deserved stars. The play is set in a back-to-back in Leeds in the 1970s, with the inhabitants, Wilfred and Connie Craven, facing a move to a maisonette since the street is to be demolished to make way for the modern world. Their lives, recorded by sociologists who sit disarmingly silent but somehow filling the room, are trivial, yet made up of the stuff of every-day life: families, anxieties, inconsequential chit-chat. Enjoy puts the lives of the Cravens on display, with Bennett-style humour that had the audience at the Birmingham Rep in stitches. Alison Steadman is excellent as Connie Craven, with her comic timing impeccable as ever.

There’s a lot more to it than that, though. Enjoy is funny, but it’s not without its serious side. In looking at how a way of life was being lost, and our rather false attempts to preserve these things as “heritage”, Bennett taps into a rich, and darker, train of thought. The community values of the back-to-backs led to “happiness”, and one wonders if these values, too – sharing, unselfishness, comradeship – are being put in a museum as relics of a different age when the world was a different place. Still, one of the ironies of the play is that the Cravens aren’t happy, not really – their children are either absent or uncaring; they don’t seem to like each other that much, and they disagree on virtaully everything. And that is another dark side to this play: how a marriage, after decades of tolerance, can become bitter and resentful; how relationships, with spouses and children, can sour. Bennett makes this funny, but some of it is startling.

To me, it seemed that another pertinent aspect of this play was its treatment of age: as forgetful, self-deluding, backward-looking, but also as optimistic, attempting to make the best of things and take the world as it comes. This aspect in particular leads to some comic moments where the laughter is definitely uneasy; Bennett meant this play to be slightly unsettling, and so it is – but if it were purely for laughs, I think one would leave feeling unsatisfied; as it is, Bennett lives up to his own belief that a play should be enjoyable (hence the cryptic title, apparently) as well as pointing to deeper meanings.

The Uncommon Reader

The Times recently described Alan Bennett as a national treasure, and here he is writing about another national treasure: the Queen. Yes, the real Queen – Elizabeth II, though he never actually names her, but contemporary references make it quite clear who she is. This book has been reviewed a lot recently as a perfect beach-read; for me, it was the perfect accompaniment to a train journey – not too demanding, suitably thought-provoking and just the right length (121 pages). The premise of the book is perfect: what if the Queen stumbled upon a mobile library whilst walking her corgis, and became an avid reader? What if she discovered the hitherto unknown and often subversive delights of literature, even neglecting her duties to pursue this new voracious interest?

Not only the Queen – who becomes more and more human and interesting as her reading takes over – but also the characters surrounding her, stuffed-shirt Palace officials, librarians etc, are comically described. It’s an amusing read (for example, after reading Proust, she says, ‘the curious thing about it was that when he dipped his cake in his tea (disgusting habit) the whole of his past life came back to him. Well, I tried it and it had no effect on me at all.’ However, it’s more thought-provoking than that; the effect that literature can have is explored in all its glory. Actually, I was gripped by the very first page, in which HM questions the president of France on his views on Jean Genet: ‘Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless as bad as he was painted? Or, more to the point,’ – and she took up her soup spoon – ‘was he as good?’

Of course, a Queen who reads – really reads, proper literature, the written equivalent of heroin -is dangerous; she is perceived by those around her as being out of control. Is literature that dangerous? Can it upset what we see as normal, stable, day-to-day life? Of course it can – or what’s the point of it? Bennett is gently poking fun, on the surface; but underneath one suspects he is raging at the lack of cultural understanding there seems to be in this country. This particular reader is ‘uncommon’ not because she is the Queen (and therefore as uncommon as one can be!) but because she is really reading, with a sensitive inner eye that understands, digests, really thinks for herself and is not afraid of the consequences. If only more readers were that uncommon.