NT Live: The Habit of Art Repeat Screening

When I was a young man, I was smooth-skinned. I was said once to look like a Swedish deck-hand.
I still may, of course. Who knows what Swedish deck-hands look like in the evening of their lives?

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 don’t believe in restraint. I do. And I hope I never see the day when in opera or in drama there is nothing that cannot be sung or said. A time of no limits.

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.’

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