The Habit of Art

Directed By: Victor Craven
Written By: Alan Bennett
Presented By: Tower Theatre Company

Composer Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, poet W. H. Auden. During Alan Bennett's imagined meeting of these two great men, their first for nearly twenty years, they are observed and interrupted by amongst others their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station.

Alan Bennett's 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 is spent : ultimately, on the habit of art.