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Alan Bennett’s THE HABIT OF ART<\/strong>, April 22, 2010 Is squalid solitude prerequisite to habitual art? A case can be made, no doubt. Yet it was strange to see Auden portrayed so slobbering, forgetful, corpulent\u2014a man in a barely buttonable cardigan, wobbling with fat and pissing into his kitchen sink. Still more dispiriting to feel, after two hours of stage talk, that whatever potential insight into the Britten-Auden relationship, or into Auden or Britten individually, or into habit or art, had been waylaid by throwaway bons mots, obligatory allusions, tweetable bits of philosophy, and well-wrung jokes about rent-boys. The mise-en-abyme was meant for art to permeate art, for the imagined scenario to stay open-ended\u2014okay\u2014but here the meta meddled and one was left with a sense of emptiness. (Past its artful phrasings, the play did not feel much more vivid and penetrating, say, than that other recent account of an Auden-generation pair, the far less sophisticated but earnestly sympathetic documentary Chris & Don<\/em><\/a> (2007).) Giving literal voice to Auden\u2019s wrinkled facescape: the sole brilliant fantasia.<\/p>\n Of course reviews<\/a> have been (just<\/a> about<\/a>) uniformly<\/a> glowing<\/a>. Light bawdiness, quippy literariness: so theatre, so English.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alan Bennett’s THE HABIT OF ART, April 22, 2010 National Theatre, London\u2014via simulcast at NYU Is squalid solitude prerequisite to habitual art? A case can be made, no doubt. Yet it was strange to see Auden portrayed so slobbering, forgetful, corpulent\u2014a man in a barely buttonable cardigan, wobbling with fat and pissing into his kitchen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1825,4537,39],"tags":[15948,15946,15947,15949,6274,2298],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-love","category-music","tag-alan-bennett","tag-auden","tag-britten","tag-chris-don","tag-london","tag-theatre"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":861,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions\/861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNational Theatre, London\u2014via simulcast at NYU<\/a><\/p>\n