HABIT OF ART

20/1/10, National (Lyttelton)

Alan Bennett's latest. Entertaining but disappointing. Some very good jokes, but structurally a mess.

He seems to have started with an idea for a play about W H Auden and Benjamin Britten meeting again in Oxford shortly before Auden's death, years after they stopped talking to one another (why? never explained). But then presumably decided that that alone was not enough to sustain a full length play, and perhaps was too weak an idea anyway, so cast around for something to pad it out.

The result is a wonderful play about a play, with a shambling Richard Griffiths (deputising for Michael Gambon, who fell ill when rehearsals were due to start) playing an insecure if successful (Tesco voiceovers) actor called Fitz, and Alex Jennings as a splendidly camp actor called Henry. Fitz is playing Auden, Henry Britten, and Frances de la Tour is playing the stage manager co-ordinating a run-through in the absence of the director, and also playing the parts of absent actors and acting the role of mother hen and confessor to her demanding, raggle-taggle charges. At the end everyone else departs, leaving her alone to turn the lights out (literally): a symbol of all those women who keep the show on the road for little thanks and no recognition in families, businesses and organisations everywhere.

This is all great stuff, with for the most part first-rate performances (only the writer, an unwelcome presence to the actors, fails to have much impact -- is that the writing or the performance?). But there are problems. In the first half there's a running gag about the actors being unable to remember their lines, and Griffiths sometimes chants his lines as Auden as if he's only just learnt them, which doesn't help one grasp the substance of what "Auden" is saying; mercifully the conceit is dropped in the second half for the big encounter between Auden and Britten. I'd have liked more of this, but judging by the coughing the rest of the audience wouldn't. The trouble is there are no jokes in the confrontation (which is mainly about Britten's repressed paedophilia), but the earlier parts of the play have conditioned us to expect comedy, especially from Richard Griffiths whose timing is simply miraculous.

There were some lovely moments but it didn't hang together being very much a play of two halves, or perhaps several. In some ways it was a succession of sketches: Jennings and de la Tour as a pair of cleaners, standing in for the absent bit-part actors who have a matinee of Chekhov (we see one of them, dressed in his serf's coat and fur hat, at the start of Act 2, before he's shooed away by de la Tour who tells him he'll miss his cue); Alex Jennings recalling his drama school "friend's" career as a rent boy; the attention-seeking, anxious actor playing the biographer (Adrian Scarborough, very good -- "I still haven't got him, have I?") performing Doris the Goddess of Wind ind rag with a tuba at the start of Act 2; etc etc. The comedy overwhelms the serious stuff, whereas usually in Bennett they're very well integrated.

The set a rehearsal room with Auden's rooms sketched in (labels saying "fridge" and "cooker", bed up some stairs, two doors but no walls) and a grand piano high up on a stage above for Britten to play while rehearsing his young boy singers (and Jennings turns out to be a very accomplished pianist).

As a love letter to Theatre it worked very well. As a fully-functioning play it disappointed.

PLAGUE OVER ENGLAND

30/4/09, Duchess

A feelgood recreation written by Nick de Jongh, who has just stepped down as the decidedly waspish theatre critic of the Evening Standard, of the 1950s when a Conservative Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyffe, vowed to stamp out the plague of homosexualuity, with the aid of aversion therapy and agents provocateurs, the "pretty police" who frequented gents' lavs to catch cottagers in the act. You wonder now what madness possessed them to attempt something so harebrained. But there's nothing so baffling as an earlier generation's obsessions.

There are some good jokes at the expense of the stupidities of the age, greeted on the night we saw it by appreciative laughter from an audience half of whom seemed to be elderly gay couples, no doubt remembering (fondly?) the years when their proclivities were a crime. There were some good jokes too at the expense if theatre critics and the Evening Standard.

Several stories interwoven, on a set with numerous doors and a revolving back wall which cleverly managed to suggest the bar of a louche gay club, the set of a country house melodrama, a gents' urinal and so on. There was lots of doubling, lots of quick changes: an excellent piece of stage management.

There was the young civil servant who jeopardises his career by having an affair with an ex-GI. There's the judge's son who falls for one the pretty police. And there's John Gielgud, arrested and fined for cottaging while rehearsing for the provincial opening of some dreadful drawing room drama co-starring Sybil Thorndike and produced by Binkie Beaumont (resplendent in a cream suit). How will Gielgud's audience react to his conviction? Will the tour have to be cancelled? Beaumont is cagey, hypocritical; Gielgud hopelessly naive.

Most of the cast I recognised, few I could properly place. Celia Imrie the only woman, playing Thorndike and the madame of a gay club, sometimes barely audible. Michael Feast doing a passable imitation of Gielgud, including the waspish humour. David Burt as a succession of manservants, waiters, lavatory attendants, all more or less camp. John Warnaby as Gielgud's friend, a portly theatre critic.

It was an old-fashioned play, a series of linked sketches, which reminded me of Alan Bennett. Funny, touching, soft-centred, engineering a happy ending by virtue of flashes forward to the 1970s and the decriminalisation of homosexuality and underlined by the judge's son and the pretty policeman stripping off an rolling around passionately.

Stephen Poliakoff was in the audience. So was Nick de Jongh, who sat right behind us. That might have been unnerving. Happily there was no need to pretend: we enjoyed it greatly.