The Habit of Art
Lyttelton
Cock
Royal Court Upstairs
Here’s my theory. Alan Bennett alighted on Auden and Britten as a promising theme. Two interesting old poofs collaborating on an opera shortly before their deaths. The first draft turned out to be static, chat-heavy and lacking in dramatic movement. Start again. Write a play about a company of actors rehearsing the Auden/Britten play. That’s better. That loosens things up. It adds gags. It adds layers, too. If we get bored with Auden and Britten we can watch the actors break character and make comments, discuss historical details and complain about the sorts of things actors complain about.
The chap playing Auden’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, wants to beef up his role so he begs the writer to give him a cameo as a cross-dressing tuba player. That’s funny, sort of. There are better gags. At their first meeting at his Christ Church rooms, Auden mistakes Carpenter for a male prostitute. ‘I’m not a rent boy,’ huffs Carpenter, ‘I was at Keble.’ But the bifocal approach has drawbacks. It’s unclear whether the main character is Auden or the actor, Fitz, who impersonates him. Britten scarcely gets a look-in. He enters late and is played for laughs as a vain, confused, buttoned-up prig struggling to master his passion for choirboys. Bennett shows very little interest in his music at all.
The picture of Auden is fuller but still incomplete, an Augustus John rather than a Holbein. He’s a shambolic sophisticate, a compulsive talker, a wordsmith with touches of the hack about him searching for a subject, any subject, on which he can shower his surfeit of ability. That description applies equally well, I suspect, to Bennett. Richard Griffiths precisely captures Auden’s weary warmth and erudite melancholy. The transitions between Fitz’s booming Rada tones and Auden’s effete, semi-Americanised drawl are brilliantly achieved. And Frances de la Tour, as a put-upon stage manager, gives a bravura display of understated comedy.
But Bennett’s decision to write two plays in one doesn’t solve the basic problem: no ending, no dramatic turning point. The play drifts badly in the third act and the tedious final quarter of an hour is enlivened only by a top-notch gag about the National Theatre feeling like a leisure centre: Cottesloe, snooker-hall; Lyttelton, boxing venue; Olivier, ice-rink. The portrait of Auden is sanitised, almost prettified. There’s little suggestion of his profound despair, his ill temper, his coarse, impulsive and bitchy literary prejudices. Instead, he’s presented as an egg-stained teddy bear blessed with a Christ-like sagacity. Despite the play’s vast stores of charm, I was troubled by a familiar and uneasy sensation: Alan Bennett is theatre’s Tony Blair. His prime concern is to be liked by everyone, always, whatever the cost. And I admit his spell worked on me. I was beguiled. I was bewitched. Or was I just had?
Award for Nasty Play of the Week goes to Cock. What a strange title. Shifting theatre tickets is a business, like any other, and it’s daft to embarrass your customers at the point of sale. It gets dafter. Mike Bartlett’s play involves a gay man and a straight woman competing for the love of a tedious homosexual narcissist. Mr Narcissus invites both lovers to dinner. (Nothing in this play is remotely believable.) ‘I love you,’ he says to his boyfriend. ‘But sex with her is better.’ Having been awarded five stars as a blow-up doll, the girl begs the self-adoring fool to father her children. The girl’s character makes no sense. Her love for this charmless shallow-boots is a fantasy willed into existence by the writer who wants to examine his fascination with the comforts of bourgeois heterosexuality. The play is steeped in envious longings for family life. It’s also horribly misogynistic. As the pile of girl-baiting insults grew higher, the women in the audience tittered away approvingly which led me to deduce that women are far more committed misogynists than men.
The show’s big attraction is Ben Whishaw, an interesting actor destined for movies rather than the stage where his physical shortcomings are always exposed. Whishaw’s anatomy is a magnificent disappointment. The head of Byron, the torso of Jedward, the legs of Emu. He plays the lead here without exerting himself too much. Aside from its emotional illiteracy and twisted voyeurism, the show’s worst feature is an experimental seating arrangement. Beneath burning spotlights we crammed ourselves into a wooden box arranged around a bear pit in which the actors shouted, spat and fizzled at each other just inches from our faces. Depriving the audience of its anonymity doesn’t draw them into the show. It unsettles and excludes them. I escaped this house of horrors in a fever of nervous bemusement. Ultimately I felt a pang of sorrow for the author. Poor chap. He needs to get on a plane to Malawi pronto and find himself an orphan-broker.
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