You could say that Alan Bennett’s 2009 play-within-a-play, The Habit of Art, came home when it opened at the Oxford Playhouse last night.

It is set in an appropriately higgledy-piggledy rehearsal room where a company are rehearsing a play called Caliban’s Day which centres on a fictional encounter in 1972 between erstwhile collaborators, the poet W. H. Auden 1907-1973) and composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). In his later years, Oxford alumnus Auden, who was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1951 to 1956, spent his winters in the Brewhouse, a cottage in the grounds of Christ Church College. Having successfully worked together on projects such as Night Mail for the BBC in the 1930s and in New York where they wrote Britten’s first opera Peter Bunyan, Auden and Britten’s friendship ended in 1942 when the composer and his partner Peter Pears returned to England.

Director Philip Franks deserves great credit for achieving a lucid production of The Habit of Art which is a structurally complex and multi-layered piece. Caliban’s Day, the play we see in rehearsal, is loosely inspired by Auden’s long poem The Sea and the Mirror, a meta-theatrical commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where Caliban is given an opportunity to address the audience at the end. With the theatrical conceit of a play within a play, several actors play dual roles in The Habit of Art. Matthew Kelly as Fritz plays Auden, and David Yelland as Henry plays Britten. Benjamin Chandler plays Tim who arrives on a bicycle to the rehearsal where he plays Stuart, a rent boy who visits Auden’s rooms. Humphrey Carpenter, Auden and Britten’s biographer, is used as a theatrical device to transmit facts to the audience. The ‘actor’ Donald who plays Carpenter (John Wark utilising different accents to differentiate the characters) is frustrated by his role as just ‘a device’ in the play. He and the other ‘actors’ question Neil (Robert Mountford) the author of the play about their characters and characteristics while the author vents his dismay at directorial cuts and interventions. Kay (Veronica Roberts) as the stage manager sympathetically ‘manages’ her cast and crew while also reading in parts of absent cast members with her ASM George (Alexandra Guelff). Guelff has a beautiful singing voice which we hear when she plays a choirboy auditioning for Britten.

By devising Auden’s and Britten’s reunion in later life, Bennett allows us and them to reflect on ageing, art, ill-health, sexuality, facts, fictions, frolics, foibles, and what might have been. In voice and body, Yelland beautifully executes the buttoned-up repressed demeanour of Britten. Kelly, with his enormous stage presence, totally inhabits the irascible Auden. As Fritz, an actor who wants to be liked, he protests at the focus on Auden’s frailties:‘I didn’t realise he would be so unsympathetic…so coarse’. Britten’s work in progress, his final opera Death in Venice, is the main topic of the duo’s conversation. Keen for Britten to be honest in his adaptation of the novella, Auden promotes himself as the ideal librettist since he knew Thomas Mann (he had married his daughter Erika Mann, a marriage of convenience so she could escape Nazi Germany). The librettist, according to Auden, is the midwife who delivers the music. Britten and Auden argue about whose innocence is corrupted in Death in Venice.

While some of this may sound a little dense on the page, on stage it is not. There are a few oddities such as talking furniture in the inner play, but The Habit of Art is very entertaining and there is more to it than meets the eye. It is littered with knowing references to the act of writing, to criticism, and to the theatrical profession itself. Alan Bennett’s sharp witty dialogue is very well handled by this cast and no opportunity for a laugh goes amiss: the Oxford audience were particularly tickled by Stuart’s comment that North Oxford has a better class of clientele than the bus station, and Auden’s aside on the suitability of certain topics for high table discussions.

For a play featuring a poet, there is little poetry featured, but we do get treated to a nice rendition of part of Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. We might have expected to leave the theatre knowing a little more about Auden (his fixation on time and punctuality) and Britten, but we were surprised to leave pondering how ‘great lives are parcelled for posterity’ and on how small lives, the unnamed, ‘the fodder of art’ are elided. Fodder for thought indeed!