AFTER the huge success of The History Boys, the playwright Alan Bennett has turned his attention to The Poetry Man. He is writing a play about WH Auden that will be premiered at the National Theatre.

His unusual choice of subject could be seen as a follow-up to The History Boys, his 2004 drama that was garlanded with awards and became the National Theatre’s most successful production.

In that work, Auden is a particular favourite of Hector, the teacher played by Richard Griffiths in both the original production and the film. He and the schoolboys preparing for the Oxbridge entrance examinations at a northern grammar school recite Auden’s poetry, talk about how he “snogged his pupils” when he was a teacher and joke about his character.

At one point Bennett has one of the boys say: “We’re not just a hiccup between the end of university and the beginning of life, like Auden, are we, sir?”

Bennett clearly now thinks Auden is worth more than a hiccup and has just handed over the first draft of his new play. It is described as about Auden but not a straightforward biographical account of his life.

The playwright and his latest subject have interesting similarities. Both Bennett and Auden were born in Yorkshire. Both were for a time teachers. Bennett, too, is now open about his homosexuality. Bennett, though, has proved more commercially astute. Both The History Boys and his earlier work The Madness of George III were made into successful films.

By contrast, Auden’s popularity now largely rests on Funeral Blues - known by its first line “Stop all the clocks” - which featured in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.

More recently Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the model turned chanteuse and wife of the French president, set two Auden poems to her music on a CD.

Bennett, while a fan of Auden, is not uncritical of the poet. The playwright wrote in the London Review of Books earlier this year that there was “a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as a poet of Cumbria”. Auden wrote poetry inspired by walks on Alston Moor, just over the Yorkshire border in Cumbria.

In the article, Bennett said: “Auden couldn’t have inhabited his ideal landscape, however nurturing he found the idea of it. Everything about him was urban. He wanted opera, libraries, restaurants, rent boys, all the appurtenances of civilisation. You don’t find them in Penrith.”

Katherine Bucknell, Auden’s biographer, said last week: “This is partly fair comment by Bennett, particularly in Auden’s later life, but those landscapes were always incredibly important to him and his poetry.”

Though the new play is still in first draft, it is expected to be a coup for the National Theatre. The History Boys has helped the National’s finances over the past four years, following two runs at the theatre itself, tours around Britain and overseas including on Broadway and in Australia, and two productions at the Wyndham’s theatre in the West End. The current production there ends next weekend.

Bennett, who has also had big successes with his Talking Heads dramas for the BBC and autobiographical books such as Untold Stories and Writing Home, has a strong relationship with Nicholas Hytner, the National’s artistic director. Hytner declined to comment on his hopes for the new work.

Bucknell believes Auden is likely to prove a popular subject: “He has such a knowing presence. He had this gift for condensing in his poems the things we live with and experience.”

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