THE national media attention may fall on Allelujah!, Alan Bennett's new NHS play, his first work in six years, at The Bridge Theatre, London, but should that be a Bridge too far to attend, then, hallelujah, York Theatre Royal has another good reason to go Bennett watching.

In tandem with The Original Theatre Company, the Theatre Royal is mounting the first revival of The Habit Of Art since its London premiere at the Lyttelton in 2009.

It hasn't caught on in the same way that The History Boys resonated so widely, but nor should it just be confined to history, continuing as it does the warmth, wistfulness and yet still withering wit of the Leeds playwright's autumn years, where he now writes freely about men's sexual desires (for men and teenage boys in both The History Boys and now The Habit Of Art).

As with The History Boys, it is far more wide-ranging than that, again occupying the world of academia and creativity, but it is no mere academic exercise, even if one theatre-goer on the opening night worried it "might be too erudite" as she headed for an interval reflection. It isn't, but any play with York poet WH Auden and composer Benjamin Britten at its core will have an intellectual air. Here they are in their twilight days, in 1972, facing up to mortality, just as Bennett was beset by illness when writing the first draft of a multi-layered play that takes the form of a play within a play.

The setting is a crowded rehearsal room for Caliban's Play, a new work triggered by Auden's The Sea And The Mirror that offers a hymn to the neglected, the left behind, like Firs at the end of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. The director is stuck in Leeds and so Neil (Robert Mountford), the increasingly frustrated author, is overseeing the rehearsal with the briskly efficient assistant stage manager George (Alexandra Guellf).

Affable Matthew Kelly is playing Fitz, the ageing, line-losing lead thespian playing Auden, now living in a Christ Church lodging, peeing in his sink, punctual to the last second, waiting for a rent boy (Benjamin Chandler's Stuart), when a keen young journalist, Humphrey Carpenter, later to be his biographer, turns up, as played by Donald (John Wark), one of those actors desperate to make too many suggestions.

This is one level of Bennett's play, looking at the actor's craft, how they fear failure, forgetting lines, losing it. Better is the second half's reunion of the freely expressive Auden and the fastidious, buttoned-up Britten (a suitably precise David Yelland), as imagined by Bennett, as they mull over death, their art, their gay experiences, their earlier fallout, and above all their never-ending, but increasingly anxious need to be creative, like Bennett himself. The habit of art, no less.

Kelly and Yelland forge an enjoyable double act under Philip Franks's astute direction in a play that is a little self-indulgent, but has you bathing in Bennett's beautiful turn of phrase at the finale as he wonders at the continuing importance of plays, "persistent plays".

Alan Bennett's The Habit Of Art, York Theatre Royal and The Original Theatre Company, York Theatre Royal, until September 8, then on tour. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk