But I'm from the BBC

I am glad to see that the Coolidge Corner Theatre has had to add an encore to their encore of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art, which nineweaving and I saw simulcast live last Thursday. It's a play with so much packed into it, a summary risks looking like the set of Auden's disastrous rooms at Christ Church, chockablock and sliding with books, clothes, papers, trays, and dear God, I don't want to know what's in the sink, except that what's in the sink is part of the point, and so is what's in the piano and the notebooks and the iPod and the script, because we are not only watching actors on a stage, we are watching actors at a rehearsal. What they are rehearsing is Caliban's Day, a curate's egg of a new play for the National Theatre; at its heart is the fictional last meeting of Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden in 1972, a poignant, provocative, unresolved raking-up of questions whose weightiness—inspiration, realization, responsibility, desire—is somewhat impaired by a biographer in fourth-wall crisis and apostrophizing furniture. The director has gone off to a conference in Leeds, leaving the stage manager to do the ego-wrangling while the playwright watches warily from the sidelines. The actors interrupt, rerun their lines, reappraise their characters, argue with the author, argue with each other, argue with history. It's all fast as razors and metafictional as insert postmodernist here. And it's really, really, really funny—and I don't just mean that I laughed out loud when a line repurposed from the War Requiem rehearsal tapes went by. (Although I did. I think I was the only person in the theater who did. Alan Bennett, you can thank me later.) Wystan is waiting for a rent boy. Benjie is tying himself in knots over Death in Venice. If you can't joke about sex and death and actors, what can you? Aristophanes would have been proud of some of the dick jokes in this play.

I am not convinced that every minute of the play works as it's intended to—the fictional playwright, Neil, has trouble working out an ending for Caliban's Day, and the stage manager's final summing-up of The Habit of Art did not, for me, have the bone-resonance of some of the speeches that preceded it. But I love what there is, especially the knife-turns from ribaldry to raw pain, the subtle as well as broad interplays of the two levels of drama,¹ and I am hoping devoutly that a DVD of the production will be released so that I can inflict it on friends and family. Failing that, I shall see what I can do about getting the published script. And if there are still tickets for the second encore in May, I recommend you look into them!

This post brought to you by the fact that the two arias I've been assigned to learn are "Embroidery in childhood" from Peter Grimes and The Rake's Progress' "No word from Tom." Happy May Day. I wish I could find my recording of Albert Herring.

1. It is perhaps inevitable that Richard Griffiths' Fitz should be very heterosexual and not particularly enamored of the man who wrote "The Platonic Blow"; it is more nuanced that Alex Jennings' Henry is gay, because that means something very different for him who went to RADA in the '70's than it did for Britten, who is here so circumspect he seems always to have his back to a wall. Incidentally, I loved him. Another one for the phone book list.