poetry
Ismene Brown
It sounded a dry subject and a dry title for Alan Bennett’s first play for five years - a fictional meeting between composer Benjamin Britten and poet W H Auden 25 years after they fell out, two old buggers, one furtive, the other extrovert. But at last night's premiere The Habit of Art proved an excruciatingly funny play, ribald, merciless, and as much about the bad habit of Theatre as that of the higher-toned Art. Nicholas Hytner has given it a wildly enjoyable production at the National Theatre that fields some epic comic performances in a bravura script.Wystan Auden was “in the imperative Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Thirteen years ago, I visited the magnificent Morgan Library & Museum with the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, whom I was profiling for The New York Times. She was starring in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, and it made sense for us to view the Morgan’s exhibition of Brontë juvenilia together. Gainsbourg seemed haunted by the show; I know I was. It was the sight of the tiny writing, the tiny gloves (Charlotte Brontë’s), and the locks of thin blondish Brontë hair - close enough to touch - under the glass cabinets. One could feel the siblings’ unquiet slumbers.There’s none of William Blake’s Read more ...