Our Habit of Art

Alan Bennett’s new play The Habit of Art is currently in previews at the Royal National Theatre in London (above), and is already sold out through March 2010. An extension has already been announced! This, despite the last minute withdrawal of Michael Gambon, who was cast in the lead role of the poet W. H. Auden and dropped out because of poor health. The replacement actor is Bennett regular Richard Griffiths!


This of course reunites playwright and actor with director Nicholas Hytner, who is also the current Artistic Director of the National and, on the night I was there, dutifully taking notes during the preview.


Also appearing in the play is the inimitable Frances de la Tour, completing the reunion of the core artists behind The History Boys.


On the evidence of the crowd’s full-hearted applause and the first wave of critical acclaim, they are poised for a repeat of that play’s worldwide success.

The Habit of Art is a great valentine to the theatre. Other recent plays in this genre include Jeff Whitty’s The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler and Bill Cain’s Equivocation, both of which were premiered by Bill Rauch, who I will be assisting on a production of Hamlet in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 75th-anniversary season next year.

As the audience enters, a lone figure paces between a corner table and what looks like a ramshackle set within a set. The play begins with the arrival of several actors and a stage manager, immediately establishing that we are assembled to watch a play within a play. All the familiar archetypes are present: the ageing diva actor, the easily threatened playwright, the new boy, a child actor and his stage mother, and of course the long-suffering stage manager. The conceit of the play is that we are to watch a run-through without a director in attendance. Insecurities surface, egos flare and walkouts ensue, but of course the great power of theatre to hold its community together toward a common purpose prevails, and at the end, we are left with the devastating image of Ms. de la Tour’s stage manager, alone in the rehearsal room long after the rest of the company has disappeared.

The genius of Alan Bennett’s play lies in the invisible divide he draws between artifice and reality. Even as the play maintains that nothing is remotely real about the situation that we are observing – going so far as the insert ridiculous interludes of objects that talk to the poet while he is alone on stage – we find ourselves suddenly observing moments of profound truth and honesty. Some of this is due to the skill of a first rate ensemble of stage actors, but the real credit goes to the playwright for asking an audience to watch the credible illusion of a reality that maintains it is not reality (the rehearsal room), which then becomes an even further removed fiction (the play-within-a-play), shuttles furiously back and forth, and somehow reaches a level that sublimes all the fiction into universal observations about what it is to be human.

The question one comes to at the end of the night is whether or not the rehearsal room really is universally acceptable as a microcosm of the world at large. I of course regularly fall in love with plays that are living proof that the life I have chosen for myself is worth living, and brings worth to others. But can a play like this – endlessly filled with backstage double entendres, in-jokes and witty wordplay – actually connect to a tourist teenager who happened to decide on a whim to see what the RNT is all about? Time, and the inevitable Broadway transfer (check out the NY Times advance review), will tell.


Above, Alan Bennett

(posted by Ed)