I spent last Friday evening at events to support the work of two local theatres, the Oxford Playhouse and the Pegasus. Since the first involved a talk by almost everyone’s favourite raconteur, Alan Bennett (pictured) and the second featured something in the way of alcoholic lubrication, neither proved irksome to attend. Rather the contrary, in fact.

The Bennett appearance at the Playhouse was the last event of the theatre’s £1m 70th anniversary appeal to help fund future operations there and in the community. There was, of course, a full house.

The writer devoted the first part of his talk to an explanation of the genesis of his latest play, The Habit of Art, which has just opened to rave reviews at the National Theatre. Although he didn’t say so, I guessed his text was probably his introduction to the published edition of the play.

Unless you already have a ticket for the production there will be no chance of seeing it yet awhile as it is sold out for the first few months of the run. I am lucky enough to have tickets for a matinee early next month and am looking forward to it hugely.

As anyone who follows these things will know, the play concerns a meeting in Oxford in the early seventies between the poet W. H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten, who are played respectively by Richard Griffiths and Alex Jennings. In fact, the two actually take the parts of actors, since the setting is a National Theatre production of a play about the men’s meeting.

The encounter, as Bennett reminded us on Friday, didn’t actually happen. Decades before, the two men had fallen out, in part over a failed artistic collaboration. In the early 1940s, the two had lived together – in the sense only of being under the same roof – in a house in Brooklyn. Other tenants included novelists Carson McCullers and Paul Bowles and the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (!). The story of this bizarre menage is amusingly told by Sherill Tippins in her book February House, which was published in the UK by Simon and Schuster in 2006. This is well worth seeking out.

The books that many will know concerning Auden and Britten are the biographies written by the much-missed Oxford writer and broadcaster, the late Humphrey Carpenter. He appears as a character in The Habit of Art, though a very different character, Bennett acknowledged, from the kind and comfortable Humphrey.

He admitted on Friday, too, that he disliked both Auden and Britten – the first for his clever-dick bossiness, the second for his ruthless approach to personal relations.

No one can doubt that Auden was far from being a likeable person by the time he came in 1972 to live at Christ Church, where he had been an undergraduate half a century before. His drinking would have made sure of that. In an interview with the Daily Mail he said: “Before lunch I have a vermouth, with lunch I have beer. At ten to six I start on vodka martinis, at dinner I have wine.”

This will not surprise all those – I was among them – who saw the shambling figure in the streets and cafes around the college at the time. How thoroughly unpleasant he had become is revealed in a story told by another of his biographers, Richard Davenport-Hines. Introduced to miner-turned-author Sid Chaplin at a conference in Newcastle, Auden curtly dismissed him with the withering remark: “Oh, I see. A regional author.”

Regional is rather how Bennett appears, his strong northern accent sounding almost a parody of himself on Friday. There was no doubting the power of his words, however.

During a question and answer session, he offered sharp criticism of modern educational policy.

“When I put my stuff at the Bodleian Library [the generous bequest of papers that could have brought him millions] it was a token of gratitude not merely to Oxford but to the State that sent me here.

“The State was the saviour of a boy like me. Without the State and Leeds Education Committee giving me a scholarship, I don’t know what would have happened to me.

“It is wrong that students should have to take out loans. It is the thing I most fervently believe.”

One questioner wondered if his famed honesty about other people’s lives could usefully be applied when he wrote about his own relationships.

He said: “I don’t want to share my life entirely with the public, and there are large parts of my life which I haven’t written about but which are of great moment to me.

“I would rather leave it until I was gone and let someone else do it.”

It is fervently to be hoped that the need will not arise for many years yet.

From the Playhouse, I caught a bus to Iffley and the Hawkwell House hotel where supporters of the Pegasus Theatre were holding what was styled an Auction for Change. This was designed to raise money for work in encouraging more young people to take part in various art forms, regardless of age and ability. This is a cause of which, I feel sure, Alan Bennett, would strongly approve. He would also be pleased to know that the £11,559 raised included £475 from the sale of two tickets for The Habit of Art.