Alan Bennett’s newest play is a masterclass in metatheatricality.  The Habit of Art is set in the National Theatre during rehearsals for a play by an unnamed writer, whose theme is an imagined late-in-life meeting between erstwhile friends Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden.  The play, called Caliban’s Day in an allusion to Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, is presented to us complete with long-suffering producer, egotistical writer, and actors who tend to nod off mid-scene, gripe about their role, even spurn rehearsals altogether because they are acting in a Chekhov matinée elsewhere.  Humphrey Carpenter, biographer of both Britten and Auden, is also a character in Caliban’s Day: the action’s frame narrator.  This is nicely mimetic of Carpenter’s real-life relation to Britten and Auden, but as with much else that is good about Caliban’s Day (or is it The Habit of Art?), we scarcely have time to notice and admire it before somebody onstage does something to break the spell.

While this level of convolution could seem a Pirandellian flourish if it came from another writer, coming from Bennett it appears as if the river of our playwright’s persona had burst its dam.  The major feature of The Habit of Art is a kamikaze self-consciousness: the play uses its reflexivity to pre-empt and rebuff just about any audience criticism.  If a speech is mawkish, you can bet one of the characters will say so; if something happens that is ludicrously improbable, such as a conversation between Britten’s musical notes and the words of Auden’s poems, the pragmatic producer will say it before you can whisper it to your neighbour. Such forward planning is impressive, to be sure, but it also gets a little annoying.  There is a measure of tricksiness in Bennett’s being able to cock a snook at some of his own ideas, just by virtue of having put them in the mouth of someone else.

To an extent, of course, double-dealing is an authorial privilege.  In a recent monologue for BBC Four, Bennett remarked that when you are a writer, no experience is completely pure: there is always the ‘little monkey on your shoulder’, thinking about how what you are going through, however lacerating, is going to look when it has been written down.  It is important that during this monologue, Bennett references Patrimony: A True Story, Philip Roth’s memoir of his father’s decline and demise; in particular the scene at Herman Roth’s deathbed, where the son realises that his grief cannot ever be completely, unselfconsciously authentic – because he is even now planning the manner in which he will write about the moment of his father’s death.  Bennett’s exposure of theatrical scaffolding in The Habit of Art could be viewed as a reminder of just this paradox: the intrinsic disingenuousness of the artist.

In a 2009 essay on his new play Bennett asserted that, not having been ‘seriously incommoded’ by censorship himself (it was abolished in 1968, the year of his first production), he has also felt the lack of it as a structural principle:

‘With censorship there was a line between what one could and couldn’t say, and the nearer one got to this line the greater the tension… After censorship went, the dramatist had to manufacture tension of his or her own.’

(London Review of Books, 5 November 2009)

It is probably that statement, itself a little disingenuous, which sheds most light on Bennett’s decision to write The Habit of Art as he wrote it.  The ‘tension’ which would have been present had the story only been about an ageing Auden, a brittle Britten, perhaps did not present the playwright with enough that was new, or enough that was sufficiently taboo: pederasty, he’s treated; marginalised young boys too; the problems of ageing and imminent obsolescence have riddled his plays for years.  In The Habit of Art all these are still here: but they are joined by the specific, metatextual battle of the author against his and everyone else’s comfortable, habitual sense of what literature can do.  This is possibly the most dangerous topic Bennett could have tackled, because in his best-loved plays – and naturally The History Boys is an exemplar of this – literature is always presented as at least somewhat salvific.

It is conceivable that after spending half his life in the playwriting trade, Bennett is ready to show us the unglamorous side-effects of his longstanding habit.  But there is something unremitting, bordering on aggressive, in the way he brings this new-found problematic about.  Audience members’ constant awareness of their status as patrons of the National Theatre; frequent reminders of the essential falsity of a situation in which men and women are paid to impersonate other men and women (real or fictional); heavy-handedly bivalent allusions to the habit, the habit, of art; reference to the morality or otherwise of writing about the real lives of famous artists – all this, the play flings at us unprocessed.  The little monkey has started whispering to Bennett that the act of writing is compromised by the fact of writing – so that we are being asked to disbelieve the author’s very ability to write a play.  Bennett listens to the monkey, ties his audience in knots and then asks them to untie themselves, while emphasising how meaningless and illusory those knots are.

None of the disappointment of The Habit of Art – and there is plenty – comes from its salacious revelations regarding Auden and Britten’s private lives; the public has long been able to leave that sort of disbelief suspended somewhere between the postal addresses of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin.  Rather, the starry sheen that has been taken off Auden and Britten, and Bennett too, is the sheen of art itself.  Steering us tremulously close to the kind of play The Habit of Art might have been, Bennett also makes us feel that if he had written that play, it would have been a cop-out: a walk in the same reverent footsteps that hosts of Auden’s and Britten’s devotees have already trodden.  So in this play, where Auden’s poetry or Britten’s music do peep above the parapet, it is only briefly, and soon submerged by the actor in question falling out of character and into a fit of pique, or a deep sleep, as the case may be.

At one level, The Habit of Art feels like the enemy of art, enthusiastically querying the wisdom of going to the theatre, writing poems, composing music or any kind of aesthetic endeavour at all.  And yet, just as Larkin enacts a bravura hypocrisy in his poetry, formally responding to but thematically thumbing his nose at the hope that literature will ‘solve, and satisfy, / And set unchangeably in order’, so does Bennett know that the literary conventions he sends up are also those that have held him and his playgoers in place for forty years and more.  Uncomfortably though The Habit of Art might wear its own theatricality, it is after all a play, shot through with one certainty: neither Auden nor Britten, nor Bennett himself, would be anywhere at all if they were to shrug the habit of art off.

The Habit of Art is currently playing at the Lyttelton Theatre, with a national tour to follow in late 2010.

A version of this article will also appear in the Oxford Left Review.

‘Art’, by Nick Brown