Billy Budd English National Opera
28th June 2012
Conductor Edward Gardner
Director David Alden
Designer Paul Steinberg
Costume Designer Constance Hoffman
Lighting Designer Adam Silverman
Movement Director Maxine Braham
Cast
Billy Budd Benedict Nelson
Captain Vere Kim Begley
Claggart Matthew Rose
Mr Redburn Jonathan Summers
Mr Flint Darren Jeffery
Lieutenant Ratcliffe Henry Waddington
Red Whiskers Michael Colvin
Donald Duncan Rock
Dansker Gwynne Howell
Novice Nicky Spence
Squeak Daniel Norman
Bosun Andrew Rupp
The Novice’s Friend Marcus Farnsworth
First Mate Oliver Dunn
Second Mate Gerard Collett
Maintop Jonathan Stoughton
Billy Budd is an unlikely opera in many respects – not least in that it is for all male voices. Yet is has achieved a place in the performed canon of modern operas – and maybe the most regularly performed of Britten’s many operas…Gloriana being perhaps his least performed though in my view perhaps one of his greatest works. But Britten’s take on Elizabeth Tudor isn’t for the queasy stomachs of those fed on the sterilised milk of the Elizabethan myth.
Budd is in two long acts but it’s Act II with its massive chorus – this is the moment we’ve been waiting for- when electrifying drama and music come fully alive – full of wonderful and accessible music – haunting, lonely, lyrical and brimming with heartfelt emotion;pregnant with regret – as life is always filled with regret. But Britten distils this commonplace of every life into a sacramental cordial of spiritual regret.
Billy is the handsome naïf; his beauty is palsied by a stammer; he is brought low by others contaminated with lower hatred and venal ambitions. Vere, the captain of the HMS Indomitable, in the Revolutionary Wars, presides over the injustice meted out to Budd knowing he might have done more and tortured with remorse for his failure so to do. He spends an old age reliving these events as if by their repetition he might escape his ultimate guilt. But ultimately like all revolutions…his conscience merely brings him back to the beginning over and over.
On the Indomitable there are shadowy worlds lurking below deck and hiding behind authority. Darker deeds and darker hatreds lie hidden on board ship in the deepest recesses of the darkness of the hold. This dark place is personified by Jack Claggart. Britten lavishes profoundly disturbing and yet profoundly beautiful music to this black villain. In this production Claggart is masterfully and movingly sung by John Rose. His Claggart inhabits that same world – or piece of hell untouched by hope; unredeemed by love – that has shaped characters such as Iago, or Edmund in Lear or Scarpia in Tosca or even the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos. John Rose gives us this disturbed malice and evil full of suggestive sexual repressions.
Britten\’s music expertly explores the nether reaches of irrational hatreds and fear ably assisted by the darkly suggestive libretto of E.M. Foster and Eric Cozier. These two draw from this story set amidst War and Revolution something of the parallel paranoia that informs the aftermath of the cold victory in 1945. Fear of new ideas stands in for the anti-communist frenzy that briefly gripped the Cold War world divided into two armed neutralities and in which the McCarthy witch hunts blazed brightly and furiously.
Throughout the opera the freedom of above deck contrasts with the darker side of life below deck. This however is entirely lost in a production that sets the whole opera inside the hulk of some 1940s battleship or submarine and in so doing makes less than no sense of both Billy’s blue-eyed blue-sky take on life as a maintop man. It means the claustrophobia of the below deck world is unrelieved which is entirely against the point of dramatic tension in both libretto and music.
The singing is great – especially the ensemble of the chorus. Billy was well sung by Benedict Nelson but it was a performance that failed to get quite to the big heart that is Billy Budd. Kim Bagely gave us a suitably tortured Edward Fairfax Vere. For the rest performances struggled to impose themselves on the production.
Indeed the production’s values threw everything overboard in the rootless pursuit of one big idea. The trouble was the bleak singularity of David Alden’s artistic conceit turned a good idea into bad drama and at the end I was singularly unmoved by this version of Billy Budd – which is a great shame because it is a very great opera….