Of course, technically it isn't his play, but a play which one of Bennett's characters has written entitled Caliban's Day, which we see being rehearsed backstage at the National Theatre. The dried-up Auden, a randy, unwashed intellectual bully, is visited by Benjamin Britten, an old friend from the 1930s, and in the core of the inner play the pair of them muse on art and sex (to no great effect, I thought, but that's not the point of this post). The Caliban referred to is the rent boy, who (once we gratefully realise is not going to be fellated by Auden onstage) acts as an antidote to the clipped vowels and middlebrow intellectualising of Bennett's protagonists.
Bennett wants us to like Auden - funny, rumbustious, unrepentant - and so he has to make us tolerate his use of male prostitutes. So the rent boy is not a damaged individual, a victim of childhood sexual abuse or a drug addict. He isn't even a boy. No, he's a jolly outgoing charmer in his twenties who just loves to service eminent washed-up poets whose trousers smell of urine.
I found this male version of the old tart-with-a-heart lie both creepy and repellent.
What did the critics make of it? The man from the Times wrote that Bennett's depiction of the rent boy was " an unconvincing shovelling of A Sympathetic Member of the Working Classes into these cosy proceedings, to make some point about inequality, social injustice and so forth. It’s all as woolly as a Marks & Spencer cardie." But he still gave it four stars.
My wife's theory, that Bennett is a national treasure and therefore immune to criticism, was borne out by the Telegraph - "Alan Bennett, that most cherished of national treasures, is now 75", began its five star review. The Guardian didn't mention the rent boy at all: Michael Billington gave it four stars.
I was at school with someone who ended up as a rent boy. More typical than Bennett's evasion, he was a sad individual who died of Aids before he was 30.
