CityLife

Interview: Alan Bennett

Desmond Barrit in The Habit Of Art

Alan Bennett freely admits that his last play, the wonderful The History Boys, was partly inspired by a story the National Theatre’s Nicholas Hytner once told him about his schooldays at Manchester Grammar School.

In an even looser way, Bennett’s brilliant The Habit Of Art, in which WH Auden, Benjamin Britten and Humphrey Carpenter speculatively meet in Auden’s Oxford college study, could (at something of a stretch!) be said to have been partly inspired by The History Boys.

“Well, in The History Boys, the charismatic schoolmaster, Hector, talks about Auden and knows a lot about him, and Auden keeps cropping up in the play, so that’s why Auden is there,” Bennett tentatively agrees, albeit with his characteristic tact and grace.

“The first time I remember thinking about this play, The History Boys had opened on Broadway and we flew over for the Tony Awards. I was reading a book called Britten’s Children, by John Bridcut, which talks about all the difficult questions about Britten and the boys. As we were getting off the plane I saw Nick (Hytner) and said to him ‘wasn’t Britten a real s***?’.

“I remember Nick was slightly taken aback, and that’s when I started reading more about it,” he laughs.

“Subsequently I read Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Britten, and in that when he’s talking about Death In Venice he quotes someone as saying at the time the best person to write the libretto would be Auden.

“The chronology isn’t quite right, I think Britten had got further on with Death In Venice at the point they meet in the play, but Auden was certainly at Christ Church the year before his death and it’s feasible that Britten could have gone to see him.”

But The Habit Of Art isn’t just about the historical characters, it’s also about the nature of acting and creativity, the value of art and friendship, and many other things, all told with Bennett’s customary wit and elegance.

How did that evolve, I wondered? “I wrote the first draft and sent it to Nick, who was very enthusiastic about it and sent me his notes,” Bennett recalls.

“When I then did a second draft, he was less prompt to give me his comments, so I sensed he wasn’t as keen on it. I knew I had to do something with it but I didn’t know what.

“In both of the sets of notes Nick gave me he thought there was so much information being passed over, and it was difficult to have characters who knew each other telling each other things they would have known already, so it was not a natural conversation for them to have.

“I then thought that if I made it a rehearsal, the actors could ask about this information as though they didn’t know it. So it would be fed to them and to the audience by this device. And you can have a lot more fun with it this way as well. In The History Boys, a lot of the way we rehearsed that was by the cast asking questions, and any rehearsal really is a lot do to with informing the actors about the play and the details behind it, so it worked very well for the play itself.”

Auden and Britten were very different characters in life, as they are in the play. Which of them does Alan think he personally would have preferred to be?

“Britten. Only because they keep saying in the play ‘go on!’ and he was working right up to death’s door and I think that would be the most satisfying thing. I think probably Auden had a better time, though. Britten was very, very troubled and when Leonard Bernstein talks about him he says that conducting his music he was aware of somebody who was deeply troubled and the music was an effort to resolve that.

“I’m sure that’s true. Auden was much more open and I think had more fun, but then it’s difficult to know what sort of fun Britten had because he’s a much more closeted character. He probably was, in his own way, very happy.”

So, despite the superficially valedictory nature of the play, Bennett himself intends to take Britten’s counsel and ‘go on’?

“I hope it’s not valedictory!” he shoots back. “I think there is another play on the horizon. It would have been easier to make it more valedictory really. We talked about the fact that it would be too easy to make it elegiac at the end, and I think that’s true, and I didn’t really want it to be like that for my own reasons and for the reasons of the play.

“I am very lucky because I’m now 76 and I’ve been at it for 50 years and I’m lucky in the sense that anyone can keep on writing but to keep on being listened to and being publishable is something else. I don’t think it’s any special quality of mine or literary superiority, it’s more about changing times and tastes, but I think I’m very lucky I can keep going and have an audience.”

The Habit Of Art is at The Lowry from Tuesday until October 9, 2010.