Theatre on the front pages….

One major character - a rentboy (the second in consecutive nights, coincidentally, in the theatre: Public Property that opened at Trafalgar Studios on Monday also featured one) - says to Humphrey Carpenter (Auden and Britten’s biographer) about being excluded from the pages of history, “The great men’s lives are neatly parcelled for posterity, but what about us? When do we take our bow? Not in biography. Not even in diaries.” They - “the named girls, the unnameable boys, the flings, the tricks” - are, he says, “the fodder of art.”

And he wants be a part of it, too. “There’s always someone left out. You all have a map. I don’t have a map. I don’t even know what I don’t know. I want to get in. I want to join. I want to know.”

This play, by putting him centrestage, makes a bold claim both for his role and his sense of exclusion. But I can’t see rent boys up and down the land rushing to see it, all the same; though, as the exposure of Belle de Jour’s real identity just this week has shown, sex workers come in all sorts of guises. And the character of the actor playing Benjamin Britten in the play-within-the-play proves it by revealing a bit of his own personal past in the field.

The play is intricately layered, as that suggests; and it takes quite a lot to absorb it all in one viewing. No wonder I heard that some of my critical colleagues were rushing to buy the text ahead of last night’s opening, which has been available at the National’s bookshop for the last few days; but I resisted. I wanted to experience the play as entirely new and fresh. Just last week Lyn Gardner wrote a Critics’ Notebook feature in The Guardian on the joy of seeing great plays for the first time: “When I saw Uncle Vanya at the Bristol Old Vic last week, a woman in front of me gasped when Vanya appeared on stage waving a pistol. She had clearly never seen Chekhov’s play before. Every word for her was freshly minted, each narrative twist and turn a surprise. Fortunately, Andrew Hilton’s revival is so good, it was fresh and surprising for me, too. But I can’t help feeling a little envious of that woman. There is something wonderful about encountering a great play for the first time: seeing King Lear with no expectation of the blinding; watching Three Sisters without knowing whether they all get to Moscow; sitting through All My Sons with no foreknowledge of the maggot at the heart of the family. For critics, that only happens with a new play; if we haven’t seen a classic, we are likely to have done our homework and read it.”

Even with new plays like The Habit of Art, some critics have clearly done the same and read it ahead of time, too, and for those that had to file overnight reviews to appear today, I’m not surprised they wanted to get a head’s start. But plays are meant to live onstage, not on the page, and especially with one as complex as this one, I’m glad I didn’t spoil its intricacies and surprises by reading it first. (I also saved myself £9.99 - the press office helpfully supplied us with copies of the text before we went in, and now I can enjoy the play all over again on my own).

Of course, there’s a danger for regular theatregoers now that, even if they’ve not read the play ahead of time, reading the reviews may act as a spoiler, too. I much prefer, if I can, to tune out the opinions of others before I see something for myself. That’s one of the luxuries of my job: I go to first nights, so - short of scouring the bulletin boards, which I try to avoid (and the advance preview reviews of the West End Whingers, which I find impossible to resist) - I can indeed usually do so.

But reading the reviews after I’ve seen something and written myself often puts the work in fascinating new contexts. I was moved by the play already, for instance, but even more moved by Paul Taylor’s brilliant connection of Alan Bennett and his own late best friend Russell Harty: As Paul concludes, “How fondly, one fancies, Harty would have enjoyed seeing his old friend ‘fixed up’ with love and to have witnessed this play and the discreet depth of its tribute to him. Thanks to his benign influence on this new Bennett play, we are now all in his debt - and so Russell Harty, from my side of the Styx to yours, I would like to shake your hand.”

At the same time, I was disturbed and disappointed to read, too, of how, hot on the heels of how one critic has seemingly become fixated on the size of the colleague sitting behind him at a recent National Theatre first night, another is now casting aspersions on Richard Griffiths’ ability to do his job, thanks to his size: according to Quentin Letts in his review in today’s Daily Mail, “Richard Griffiths and his spare tyres play a waspish old actor who is playing W.H. Auden towards the end of his life. That tummy doesn’t half wobble these days. Sorry, but it does. Mr Griffiths is a fine actor - hits the letter ‘t’ beautifully - but his bulk is now a fatal distraction.”

Actually, this is theatre and it’s not supposed to be a literal impersonation. Griffiths isn’t channelling Auden, but is playing an actor who is himself playing him: Bennett has put in several layers between them, including at one point a prosthetic mask that no more successfully makes the transition, that underlines the distinction. As Michael Coveney notes in his blog today, “The joke, of course, is that his characters don’t really resemble their own characters at all. When Richard Griffiths pulls on a prosthetic face mask in The Habit of Art he’s said to look more like Marlon Brando.”