Gloriana – 6th July 2013

Queen Elizabeth in the stolen dress of Lady Essex

Benjamin Britten (1953)

Director:Richard Jones

Conductor: Paul Daniel

Susan Bullock, Toby Spence, Mark Stone, Clive Bayley, Jeremy Carpenter, Kate Royal

The village hall of Fame

Elizabeth I has long inspired a cult. She is honoured by her devotees as a cross between Minerva ( the goddess wise) and the Virgin Mary (the Mother of God). Although all wise this earthly Virgin Queen is mother of the Nation more than a religious icon. The myth of Elizabeth and a Golden Age is so firmly rooted in the national psyche that questioning it on any level is regarded as tantamount to treason. However, like like many firmly rooted cults of personality it is based on fictions and falsehoods.The high priests of the Elizabethan myth ( many of whom are otherwise serious people) ask us to embrace in the case of Queen Elizabeth I vices as virtues and naturally vice-versa.

an earlier classic production that took the opera seriously…

I will illustrate with just an obvious selection: procrastination in others is a vice, in the hands of Queen Elizabeth it is ‘masterly inaction’ (Neale). A vain preoccupation with appearance and the vainglorious need for sycophancy are usually characterised as defects of personality in others in Elizabeth I they are hollowed as deliberate iconic artistry (Rowse).  Other monarchs who devise policy on whim and fancy only to chop and change directions are commonly derided as tacticians but in the hands of Elizabeth I these mortal tactical contrivances are transmogrified as far seeing stratagems of great statesmanship. (Black). This litany could be endless.

I take a more prosaic sense from words and their meaning based on the old precept that if it looks like a duck; walks like a duck; and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. The Elizabeth of history was a deal less artful than her public pose. She also was vain; vainglorious; indecisive; mean and intemperate. Many of the problems of the Stuart monarchy came from the failures of Elizabeth’s long reign.  Her policies often lacked much of a strategic goal beyond her putting off everything until tomorrow and often policy and the personal were focused just on making it through until then, but always making it someone else’s expense. Others have shared my more sanguine view of the last Tudor sovereign. Jane Austen’s essay on Good Queen Bess is less than flattering; another less flattering account is found in Lytton Strachey’s book on Elizabeth and Essex. We can certainly include Britten in its number since he largely uses Strachey as the source for the libretto of Gloriana.

Sarah Walker as Elizabeth in another production from 1980’s

Gloriana – the  festal title bestowed upon Elizabeth I by an Irishman Edmund Spenser – is at least ironic in its use in this opera. The opera was commissioned for the coronation celebrations in 1953; it is the least performed though in many ways the most conventional of Britten’s large scale operas. It has some utterly fabulous music – including a series of fanciful dances that almost define the notion of Tudorbethan. It is  a dark work full of complications which display those traits of vanity; small mindedness; meanness and indecisiveness harnessed to Elizabeth’s other qualities of intellectual brilliance, theatricality and her hard-nosed sense of self-preservation. In the end this is the Elizabeth who puts herself above her dynasty and her duty to dynasty. In that she was most certainly not her father’s daughter. This Elizabeth is tortured by her failure to rise to that first obligation of monarchy. Her haunted refusal to name her successor is once more her refusal to accept that reality. She hides from her conscience in the golden mesh of her sterile virginity. In that conscious course popularly she is perceived to be the very antithesis to her cousin, the fecund Queen of Scots, who was always willing to risk all on the throw of a dice.

By transforming the whole opera into a pageant performed for Elizabeth II all this was lost. This production made me feel like I was witnessing one of Lynda Snell’s directorial turns in the village hall in Ambridge. The opera is presented before the young Elizabeth II, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Prince Philip as if some kind of village-hall homage. It begins with a parade of monarchs, going backwards in time ( notably omitting James II for reasons of ignorance or intention I cannot say)  until we reach the Tudor period.

Susan bullock in the bedroom scene – the pink housecoat I can’t explain

The opera proper is then played as if by a fully professional company, though with stage-crew and staff recognisably amateur and of the early 1950s vintage. The current queen makes brief appearances at the very beginning and the end.

So throughout the opera at least a third of the stage is lost to vacuity as on both ‘wings’ are redundant to the action but home to a host of non-singing cast members dressed as ATS or the Home Guard, or the local school teachers, WI, greengrocers and such all doing their stuff to get the sets up and the performing cast on off the imaginary ‘stage’. It distracted from the action from opening to close. There were incongruities in this period recreation like pumpkins which were unknown to the England of the 1950’s. There was also another strange intrusion of hottentots boiling what appeared to be a Roman catholic priest in a cauldron. Don’t ask as I cannot tell you why. This ghastly conceit may have been clever but it ended up being too pleased with itself since overtook Britten’s entire work and virtually destroyed the opera and hampered the performances.

For all I know this may have been intentional. Gloriana was not well received in 1953 and the received wisdom both about Elizabeth I and Gloriana have not changed much in the sixty years since. Susan Bullock’s Elizabeth was vocally uncertain, though it had it’s moments. She was thoroughly convincing in some scenes and she sang the bedroom scene brilliantly. This is the moment when Essex breaks into the old woman’s closet and finds her bald and undressed – not yet risen with the sun to shine on her court. However, at times, there was so much ham in the performance, I could not but think of Bette Davis huffing, strutting and puffing in Elizabeth and Essex (one of her worst films by her own estimation and maybe one of the worst films ever made).

By contrast Toby Spence did remarkable things with Essex and shone out of the production like a light of hope. He sang and acted (and danced) to great effect. Jeremy Carpenter sang a wonderful Robert Cecil. Kate Royal was caramel and cream as Penelope Essex and Mark Stone also sang Mountjoy beautifully. The orchestra under Paul Daniel was splendid.

Sadly, this production failed in every way. It failed to take Britten at his word. The dramatic impact of the great central scene of the Royal Progress in Norwich where the dazzle of public monarchy contrasts with the dithering, vanity of the queen and the seething ambitions in her court, so carefully crafted by Britten to contrast the inner and outer worlds, worlds both occupied by and preoccupied by, the old Elizabeth, was completely lost. By failing to take the opening scene of the joust and fight between Essex and Mountjoy as serious as it is sinister – as the music does – the production and cast lost their way and no matter how mightily or hard they battled to make sense of things afterwards the moment was gone. Thus, the opera’s inherent drama had little or no traction.

Really when things get this bad they should pay us good money to sit through them and not vice-versa.