Billy Budd
Composer: Benjamin Britten Director: Orpha Phelan Conductor: Garry Walker
The Lowry, Salford, 10 November Then Nottingham, 17 November, and Edinburgh, 1-3 December (www.operanorth.co.uk) Running time: 3hrs (including interval)
Benjamin Britten’s nautical tragedy got a grudging reception at its premiere in 1951, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. Yet in the operatic repertoire today, Billy Budd “enjoys almost equal status” with Peter Grimes. Its storyline is taken from a Herman Melville novel, and this new touring production from Opera North tells it “honestly and effectively”. Alan Oke is excellent as the morally conflicted Captain Vere, and Roderick Williams makes a “sunny, cocksure” Billy, said Richard Bratby in The Spectator. All told, it’s a “thoughtful, atmospheric and grippingly tense production”. The chorus, in particular, is “spine-tingling”.
In my view, there’s only one good reason to see this production, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph, and it’s the singing of Williams in the title role. “For liquid ease, pearly grace and pure line, I don’t think I’ve ever heard this music delivered more elegantly.” Alas, nothing else about this Billy Budd matches his quality. Oke seems to struggle to stay in tune, and Alastair Miles’s snarling take on villainy (as John Claggart) is the stuff of pantomime. The even bigger disappointment, however, is Orpha Phelan’s staging. The panelled drawing room set by Leslie Travers suggests that the action is all taking place retrospectively inside Vere’s head: the decks and rigging of the HMS Indomitable are no more than “sketchily depicted” on its floor. But even this might have been surmountable had it not been for the “landlubberly slackness and slouching of the crew”.
Winston Churchill famously quipped that the Royal Navy’s traditions amounted to “rum, sodomy and the lash”, said Richard Morrison in The Times. How I longed for such excitement: something is badly needed to pep up this lacklustre evening. Without “mast, rigging and an ominous yardarm”, or any sense of the all-encompassing sea and the “cheek-by-jowl claustrophobia of the lower decks, this Melville yarn loses its atmosphere, and scenes start to sag”. The result, I’m afraid, is a “slightly risible melodrama”.