- Home
- Drama
- Playscripts
- The Habit of Art
The Habit of Art
The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett dramatizes an imaginary meeting between Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden, to fashion a play about two difficult men, the ethics of biography, growing old, creativity, and the habit of art.
2 in stock
Join Faber Members for 10% off your first order.
Auden often said that metre and rhyme led him down unexpected paths to thoughts he wouldn’t otherwise have had, and in this respect versification and fornication are not so different.
Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W H Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first for twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by amongst others their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station.
You are a rent boy. I am a poet. Over the wall lives the Dean of Christ Church. We all have our parts to play.
Alan Bennett’s new play is as much about the theatre as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion’s spent: ultimately, on the habit of art.
‘In the end,’ said Auden, ‘art is small beer. The really serious things in life are earning one’s living and loving one’s neighbour.’
Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for the stage including Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van (together with the screenplay), A Question of Attribution, The Madness of George III (together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George), and…
Read MoreBrowse a selection of books we think you might also like, with genre matches and a few wildcards thrown in.
Can't decide what to give your friends and family this year? Our Christmas Gift Guide is here to help. We’ve …
Faber & Faber and Profile Books are delighted to announce the joint acquisition of Alan Bennett’s Keeping On Keeping On, …