Yes, Alan Bennett’s eagerly awaited new play is brilliant in that it glitters with sophisticated bravura and, as always, there is some enjoyable situation comedy and hilarious one-liners - such as Adrian Scarborough as a bemused Humphrey Carpenter, telling the dissolute WH Auden, played by the (literally) larger than life, utterly splendid Richard Griffiths, that he can’t possibly have come to suck him off because - he’s from the BBC. On the other hand, this may be a play which strives just a tad too hard to be clever. At times it feels contrived.
The setting is a National Theatre rehearsal room, where a group of actors, author and support staff are trying, under the supervision of the long-suffering stage manager Kay (Frances de la Tour), to run through a new play about Auden and Britten in the early seventies. Cue for thoughtful, witty exploration of the vulnerability and fears of actors, and the relationship between author (Elliot Levey who gets the exasperated intensity just right) and company - not to mention the character of the National itself.
It means several actors play two or three roles. Alex Jennings, for instance, gives us a conscientious, competent, nicely camp actor playing Britten with tortured vowel sounds and awkward, anxious body language, who relaxes only at the piano keyboard. The Jennings character also ‘reads’ for the all-knowing servant in Auden’s rooms, supported by de la Tour as Stage Manager, reading for a cleaner to good comic effect. There are some lovely moments, too, when the fictional playwright gets carried away with artistic pretensions and the cast try - and fail, of course - to make sensible drama of it.
Scarborough as Donald, playing Humphrey Carpenter (later biographer of both Auden and Britten), is a mere theatrical device to his annoyance, because he wants to be more and Scarborough does the petulance well, while Bennett happily debates the difference between theatre and biography, and the incongruity of great poets hiring rent boys.
It’s a complicated play and with its esoteric references to Tippett, Spender, Larkin, Peter Pears, Death in Venice and the rest, some of its finer points will be lost on some theatregoers, although the first night audience lapped them up. I can see it quickly becoming a popular challenge to unravel A level set text.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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