The Habit of Art

The Habit of Art

by Alan Bennett
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 04/03/2010

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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.'

ISBN:
9780571255627
9780571255627
Category:
Plays
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
04-03-2010
Language:
English
Publisher:
Faber & Faber
Alan Bennett

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.

One of the National Theatre's most successful productions ever, The History Boys won numerous awards including Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play, an Olivier for the Best New Play and the South Bank Award.

His collection of prose Writing Home was a number one bestseller. Untold Stories won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography, 2006. Recent works of fiction are The Uncommon Reader and Smut: Two Unseemly Stories.

The film of The Lady in the Van starring Maggie Smith was released in 2015, and a new edition of his book of the same name a #1 bestseller for nine weeks.

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