Bennett reveals to Viv Hardwick how Geordie actor Don Warrington inspired a joke included in his latest play, The Habit of Art.

ALAN Bennett bursts into laughter when I remind him that he’s coming to Tyneside with a new play which dubs Newcastle as “nothing but vomit and love bites”. The Habit Of Art, which stages a fictional meeting between W H Auden and Benjamin Britten, features a series of such exchanges as the respected poet and the classical composer clash over their respective places in the giant scheme of things... and how well each deals with homosexuality.

The North-East insult, issued from the lips of Auden is actually a stolen joke admits Yorkshireman Bennett. “It was said by (North-East born) Don Warrington who played the supposed African chief in Rising Damp and I said to him I’d been to Newcastle and he said what on earth had I done that for because it was all vomit and love bites. So I went home and wrote it down,” he says.

The playwright saw the play staged in 2009 at the National Theatre with the powerful central role of Auden, who Bennett experienced as an undergraduate at Oxford but never dared to meet, originally written with Michael Gambon in mind.

Illness saw Gambon replaced by Bennett stalwart and Teesside-born actor Richard Griffiths. For the tour to Newcastle Theatre Royal in November 16-20, Auden is being played by Desmond Barrit. The role of Britten shifts from Alex Jennings to Malcolm Sinclair.

“We had postponed the start for a week because Michael Gambon was ill and then, after four days of rehearsal, he sort of collapsed. By the time he was coming out of ambulance he said ‘I know what they’re doing now, they’re in the canteen recasting...

and we were, of course, he was absolutely right,” he says.

Bennett’s biggest problem was in trying to introduce the two curmudgeonly old men in realistic fashion to an audience who might not be clued up on the lives of both. His hit play and film, The History Boys, produced mentions of Auden, but a flight to the US to watch the Broadway version of The History Boys added Britten.

“We had to go over for the Tony awards and I was reading a book called Britten’s Children by John Bridcut and as we were getting off the plane I saw Nick (Hytner) and said ‘oh Britten was a real shit’ and I think Nick was slightly taken aback,” says Bennett, who went on to base so much of his play on the biographies of the two men by Humphrey Carpenter that the author also ended up as a character.

But two drafts of an imagined conversation over Britten turning Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice into an opera in 1973 didn’t solve the conundrum.

“Fortuitously I was then ill and Nick had already put it into the theatre programme but I asked him to take it out because the pressure on me would be too great. So I then thought about setting it in a rehearsal room (where actors in a new play, Caliban’s Day, were playing Auden and Britten and those caught up in the meeting) allowing the actors to ask for advice about their characters because it was information they wouldn’t know,” he says.

In fact the knockabout atmosphere of the rehearsal room permits Bennett to have enormous fun using his knowledge of how actors, creatives and a frustrated writer would behave during the first full run of an all-too-serious dramatic work.

On the change from Griffiths to Barrit for Auden, Bennett says: “Richard is physically such a massive character that inevitably that dictates the shape of the play so when Des took over from him in both The History Boys and this, he (Auden) becomes a more normal and recognisable person.”

And Bennett wouldn’t be Bennett if he didn’t test the boundaries of acceptable behaviour on stage by having Auden book an Oxford rent boy and have the creatives discuss how much clothing the character will remove while standing on a chair or the level of sexual encounter to be discussed in front of a teenage choirboy starring alongside Britten.

“It was easier for the playwright before censorship completely went because you knew when you were approaching the area where things mustn’t be said. Now there isn’t a line, the playwright has to do other things. I was watching Mitchell and Webb the other night and one of them appeared on TV as Christ carrying the cross and I must admit that I was shocked,” Bennett says.

Asked about Auden’s poetry, Bennett confesses “there are bits you like and then there are other bits where you have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. I said this to Melvyn Bragg thinking that Melvyn would know and he said ‘I’m so glad you said that’.”

On his own legacy he responds: “After I’m gone I don’t care what they say. Someone did write an unauthorised biography of me although I haven’t read it. I felt rather sorry for him because most of my friends didn’t help because they knew I’d dislike it. But I read biographies myself and enjoy them.”

At 76, he is keen to create at least one more play. “I feel I am very lucky to be able to keep going and have an audience. I’ve got sheaves of unfinished stuff and I’d like to finish some because when I’m gone people will say ‘why didn’t he do something with that?’. So I’m cleaning out the bottom drawer.”

■ The Habit Of Art runs at Newcastle Theatre Royal, November 16-20. Box Office: 08448-112-121 theatreroyal.co.uk