‘The Habit of Art’ Evaluate: Theater of the Inventive Drive
The poet W.H. Auden is anticipating a lease boy, not a journalist. So when he opens the door to his residence in Oxford, England, to let the a lot youthful man in, it takes some time to clear up the confusion. Once the customer has defined that he’s not there to take off his pants, he commences an interview.
“Are you writing?” he asks the poet.
“Am I useless?” Auden ripostes. “I work. I’ve the behavior of artwork.”
Such a clean, substantial-sounding phrase — a bulwark towards others’ intrusive questions and Auden’s personal self-doubt. Still, he’s telling the reality.
In Alan Bennett’s delectably good, gently shifting, sex-spiked comedy “The Habit of Art,” the yr is 1972 and Auden is nearing the tip of his life. Suspecting that God has rescinded his genius, he retains writing anyway.
“I’ve to work, or else who am I?” he says.
All this, by the way in which, is a part of the play throughout the play within the wonderful manufacturing that the Brits Off Broadway pageant has delivered to 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. “The Habit of Art” is partially about an imagined assembly between Auden and his outdated buddy, the composer Benjamin Britten. But Bennett frames it with a band of theater individuals discovering their means by a script that tells this story — or, as he wrote in his diary in 2009, the yr “The Habit of Art” made its premiere: “a bunch of in a different way fractured individuals coming collectively to current one thing entire.”
Directed by Philip Franks for the Original Theater Company, “The Habit of Art” takes place in a dingy rehearsal corridor (the set is by Adrian Linford) the place an organization is rehearsing a brand new play. The absent director has left in cost the savvy, ego-soothing stage supervisor (a splendidly brisk Veronica Roberts), whereas the playwright (Robert Mountford) fends for himself, making an attempt to protect his script from tinkerers who would make cuts or additions.
The actor Fitz (Matthew Kelly) is a horrible snob, his dignity affronted by taking part in Auden — a job that requires him to be stained, pungent, squalid: an important man in unglamorous decline. Henry (Stephen Boxer), because the self-contained Britten, at the least will get to look civilized.
In the play throughout the play, the composer pays Auden a go to, searching for his assist, although they haven’t seen one another in many years. Britten is writing “Death in Venice” — an opera about an older man obsessive about a stupendous boy, a theme that echoes in “The Habit of Art” — and it’s not going nicely.
“I got here as a result of I really feel so lonely,” Britten says.
“Of course it’s lonely,” Auden reassures him. “It’s new. What do you anticipate?”
That’s the voice of lengthy expertise talking — Auden in his twilight, sure, and in addition Bennett, who this week turned 89. The playwright is aware of too that, in his chosen medium, a creator’s isolation finally offers method to collaboration: possibly maddening, bickersome and chaotic, however at the least not solitary.
Such is the character of theater. Such are the habits of that exact artwork.
The Habit of Art
Through May 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.