LONDON — Straight lines have never been part of the geometry of Alan Bennett, a writer known for his endearingly corkscrew approach to matters erudite. But with his “Habit of Art,” an amiable dodge of a play that imagines a late-life meeting between the poet W. H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten, he never seems to stop circling his subject. And you start to wonder if it’s because he’s afraid of not getting it right.
Alfred Molina as the painter Mark Rothko in “Red” at the Donmar Warehouse in London.
“The Habit of Art,” which opened in November at the National Theater here to affectionate reviews, reunites Mr. Bennett with several key collaborators on “The History Boys,” his greatest popular hit, including the director Nicholas Hytner and the actors Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour. “Habit” possesses many of the traits that made “Boys” so lovable: scholarly diffidence, giggly adolescent rudeness and an underlying sense of the loneliness of life.
But Mr. Bennett has chosen to present his tale of Auden (Mr. Griffiths) and Britten (Alex Jennings) within the frame of rehearsals for a play about those men called “Caliban’s Day.” And through the nervous commentary and voluble doubts of the people putting on “Caliban’s Day,” Mr. Bennett pre-emptively answers any criticism we (and he) might have about what he’s doing here. “The Habit of Art” keeps its distance from the clichés of biographical portraiture by presenting them with deflecting and deflating footnotes.
Across the Thames, at the Donmar Warehouse, those same clichés are being embraced in a bear hug in “Red,” John Logan’s two-character work about the painter Mark Rothko, directed by Michael Grandage. Set in Rothko’s studio during the late 1950s, “Red” is filled with the sort of psychodramatic goop that normally makes me want to drink paint thinner.
Structured as a fraught dialogue between Rothko (Alfred Molina) and Ken, his ambitious young assistant (Eddie Redmayne), “Red” includes earnest debates about the purpose of art, illustrated by reproductions of Rothko’s work onstage; confrontations that strip the participants to their emotional underwear; and (oh, horrors) a sequence in which the characters apply paint to canvas — to stormy classical music — in a fever of sexual energy. It’s hard not to think of Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo furrowing his brow over the Sistine Chapel in “The Agony and the Ecstasy.”
Yet for the hundred-and-some uninterrupted minutes it takes to perform “Red,” I was in its thrall. The show is staged and acted with such fierce conviction and (dare I use the word?) artistry that it never lets you look away, much less roll your eyes. Had I been told that I could see only one of these plays on the basis of their descriptions, I would definitely have gone for the Bennett. But now “Red” is what I keep thinking about.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed “The Habit of Art.” (So, it seemed, did the capacity audience I saw it with.) And I understand why Mr. Bennett’s self-consciousness is regarded as a British national treasure. But here it works against emotional engagement. Though Mr. Hytner, the resourceful artistic director of the National, does wonders in making you think otherwise, “Habit” is less a play than notes for one.
Mr. Bennett has said that he first conceived “Habit” as a more direct presentation of an imagined meeting between Auden and Britten (at Oxford University in 1972, when Auden was in his 60s). But he found himself overwhelmed by the vastness of what he wanted to include. “It occurred to me,” he writes in an introduction to the text, that by showing “Caliban’s Day” in rehearsal, “the business of conveying the facts could be largely solved.”
Mr. Bennett had already decided to use Humphrey Carpenter, who wrote biographies of Auden and Britten, as a character. Now there were two characters: Carpenter, who pontificates poetically on the nature of artists and their chroniclers, and Donald, the actor playing Carpenter (both portrayed by Adrian Scarborough), who whines about the thinness of his role.
Similarly, Mr. Griffiths is both Auden, whom he doesn’t remotely resemble, and the forgetful, anxious actor Fitz, who is given to stopping rehearsals to ask if his character would speak such lines. Mr. Jennings’s thespian character, Henry, is less disruptive, though he does provide some helpful commentary on the nature of rent boys.
Also conspicuously on hand are Tim (Stephen Wight), who plays Stuart, a hustler hired by Auden, and Neil (Elliot Levey), the vigilant playwright, whose script includes embarrassing moments in which inanimate objects (like Auden’s furniture and the creases in his face) come to life to exchange lyrical observations. Overseeing both real and fictive worlds is Kay (the marvelous Ms. de la Tour), the ego-finessing stage manager.
The doubling of identities here allows the script to introduce reflections on not only the possibilities and limits of biography (and its voyeuristic nature), but also changing social perceptions of homosexuality; the relative importance of will and talent in artistic creation; and the unsung people omitted from official accounts of the great (embodied here by the rent boy). Because Mr. Bennett is a writer of original wit and eloquence, you feel like immediately copying many of these observations into your personal commonplace book.