By Mark Ravenhill
Directed by Erica Whyman
The Royal Shakespeare Company
Swan Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
Friday 1st March 2024, 19.15
CAST
Samuel Barnett- Benjamin Britten
Victoria Yeates- Imogen Holst
Conor Mitchell- music, piano
I know nothing whatsoever about it, so from the RSC site:
The 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II is fast approaching. To mark the occasion, Benjamin Britten has just nine months to write a new opera about her predecessor Elizabeth I. Into the world of the disheartened composer enters the exuberant and passionate Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav and an accomplished musician in her own right. Her candid and can-do attitude proves to be the perfect foil for the capricious and often maddening Britten, and what begins as an arrangement of practical support turns into a bond that not only sees Gloriana to its premiere but endures throughout the rest of their lives. Originally written to mark the centenary of Britten’s birth and performed on BBC Radio 3 in 2013, Mark Ravenhill’s Ben and Imo is a powerful new play, reimagined for 2024 that explores the brilliant yet often turbulent working relationship of two of the 20th Century’s greatest musical minds.
This is an odd one for us. We really wanted to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream which we booked for Saturday afternoon. It’s winter. We are 150 miles from Stratford. On a bright dry morning, we can do the journey in two and a half hours. However, there have been days when the Oxford ring road has jammed solid. We have had four hour journeys. (This was true of returning the day after with three 30 minute plus standstills.) What would the weather be like? This last year, the police across the country seem oblivious to maintaining traffic flow after accidents and just shut things down totally. We had over three hours stuck on the M6 last year without moving at all. So we decided that the Dream was worth staying overnight before, and therefore we might as well see whatever else was on. All we saw was ‘directed by Erica Whyman’ who is a director I’d trust.
As I read more about the play’s subject, I feared that we should simply have booked The Dream for the evening performance, stayed over and gone home. Imo? IMO? In my opinion.
Then let’s add that I really don’t like plays with casts of one or two. The ticket prices do not reflect that we have just two actors versus a cast of sixteen plus musicians at the RSC at the same price. You can get just about away with it with ‘A-listers’ – Sir Ian McKellan, Dominic West, Sheridan Smith, names that sell out a production the first day. With no disrespect to the actors, nor a comment on quality, just ticket appeal, they are nowhere near that league. Two? On a very large stage? Shouldn’t this be a studio production?
The thing is that opera is the only musical form that I dislike. The second is there are strong aspects of Benjamin Britten I can’t stand, namely the records with Britten on piano with Peter Pears visiting English folk song with his Advanced RP tenor. Can’t stand, as I’d rather hear nails scraping down a blackboard. I bought this LP for £1 for the cover illustration. It is ‘not to my taste’, including the piano playing. Later folk singers like Ewan MacColl railed against piano in folk music, probably because of things like Britten and Pears and the BBC singing programmes broadcast to junior schools in similar style. MacColl was somewhat unfair as most 19th century pubs would have had piano singsongs, which might be true folk music. But I know what he meant.
To be fair, personal history impinges on this. My one-time Head of Department and co-author, John Curtin, taught singing on the side and would play and sing in a florid piano style with bellowing advanced RP voice In 1930s mode. The grand piano was on the school restaurant stage, which was empty after 4.30 p.m. when he taught, but I could hear it from my nearby office. Anything with a melody you could hum was disparagingly described by him as ‘Lollipops’ a snotty tradition the Proms continued. It really pisses me off. Anyone who says ‘lollipops’ really pisses me off.
Wikipedia has this to say:
The 1953 premiere was one of Britten’s few critical failures, and the opera was not included in the series of complete Decca recordings conducted by the composer.
I can’t find a pre-1984 recording of the lot on Discogs website either. Is it that well-known then? It toured in 1954 but then appears dormant until 1966. There was a major 2013 production to mark the 60th anniversary which the radio play original of this dates from. It’s not a work where even opera fans could name the tune.
This though is the point of the story. We don’t hear any of until the play has ended then we hear it as we walk out. Britten was forced into this Coronation Gala grand opera, against his wishes.
I have never seen such a meagre audience in the Swan before. We were all at the front, then there were many empty seats. The concept did not sell seats, disastrously so for the RSC I’d say. In the programme introduction , Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey make it clear that their new RSC regime will begin with Love’s Labours Lost. So this is not theirs.
The obvious point is that this audience would have filled a studio theatre. It has a cast of two and one pianist. This is a studio play. It is in fact a radio play blown up in scope. It is dwarfed by the thrust stage and galleries. The really bad idea was putting it in the Swan rather than the RSC’s The Other Place, just along the road. It would have benefitted from the stage at (e.g.) Bath Ustinov, large enough for the play but with a small intimate audience. It would have been full too, and given the cast size, Bath would have sold it at half the price. I can tell you from experience, that talking to 120 people in a full hall with 120 seats is exciting. Talking to 120 in a hall for 450 feels flat.
The set? Well, it’s a grand piano on a revolve stage, plus a couple of chairs and a magazine rack with some musical scores.
The excellent lighting design makes the most of it, projecting the piano shape on the back wall. A model of a house sits on the piano, and projects as if on a hill- not that it can be on a hill, because the house gets flooded (that has conveniently happened between Act one and Act two).
Reviews point out that there’s very little music indeed in a play about music. Quite true, but given the music in question, that might be a blessing.
So as it starts it’s laden with negatives. Five minutes in and they are increasing – there are some stilted lines early on. Then, surprise surprise, the actors take over. They are both absolutely brilliant. They pull you into the story. Every word is precise in delivery. This is a triumph for them, because the story is not prepossessing. It’s hard to get worked up about Freddy Ashton (who?) being in the eventual opera, or Pritchard (who?) conducting the Gala performance. It’s seventy years ago. We cannot share their angst about these people. I’ve never heard of them. One name we do know is the future narrator of Civilisation, Kenneth Clark, and he’s a mover in the gala opera project. He gets a solid, ‘Fuck Kenneth Clark.’ I can believe the intellectual classes of 1953 said ‘fuck’ a lot. I rather doubt they were so liberal with the C-word at that time.
The play has much to say on Arts Council funding and does have the ‘prescience’ fault. I was warned off this by editors years ago. Do not have characters saying very clever or very dumb things in a story set in the past, when they predict the future, and they do here on the arts in the 50s and 60s. Maybe they really did predict well.
Ben: Nine months of wasted work. Gloriana is going to be a huge disaster. We fought a war for civilisation and out of that there’s a new hunger for music in this country, we’re actually getting the government to spend proper money on the arts, for the first time we have a national opera. I can see our future: great big national buildings, great big national companies, huge enormous sensational international stars and huge great big international works of art. And I don’t want any of it …
Note the personal final line. It happened. Then they ran out of money. See this from 2022:
The cost to the taxpayer of a night at English National Opera is now £195 subsidy per seat. Put another way, every operagoer is receiving more in state benefits than most of the musicians receive in nightly pay. That is morally unsustainable.
Slipped Disc: The classical music news site 9 November 2022
I didn’t care about Britten. I knew nothing of Imogen Holst- yet these actors make me care. The relationship is fiery and odd. She knows that his partner is Peter Pears, and he’s irrevocably gay. But there is passion in their working relationship, and a lot of hugging. Is she in love with him? Or is she in love with his genius? Does he appreciate her? Or does he see her as a surrogate mother? He is wet.
Victoria Yeates sings beautifully but we hear nowhere near enough of her voice. She also does some spritely 1953 style ‘folk’ dancing, and does it extremely well too. She is exuberant in major contrast to his melancholy and indecision.
The story is that she spent her life failing to be credited for her major creative contributions, first to her father, Gustav Holst, then to Britten, then to the Aldeburgh Festival. She gave up a good job at Dartington to be his musical assistant. She did rather more than assist. She had also spent the war ‘taking music to the masses.’ She is already organizing local choirs in Aldeburgh. She defines the glass half full. Britten is the half empty. (And there’s a lot of drinking in the play. He’s on rum, she is on Drambuie).
There’s a telling scene where she produces the score of a galliard by Dalloway, and suggests he could include a galliard in Gloriana. Then when he is demonstrating a melody, she shifts just one piano note and improves it. The thing is (how would I know?) according to Wikipedia above the well-known theme from Gloriana is the dance. So a lollipop?
Wiki: However, a symphonic suite extracted from the opera by the composer (Opus 53a), which includes the Courtly Dances, is often performed as a concert piece.
Samuel Barnett is a perfectly precious petulant Britten. The refusal to give credit. The anger, the vicious cruelty. It’s all there.
Ben: Today an opera is being born and you’re not its father or its mother nor its aunt nor its grandmother. You’re not even a lady-in-waiting. So what are you? I’ll tell you what you are. You’re the dim-witted servant girl. The girl- who when the time is due – has a simple job: to run to the midwife. And now what do I discover? You can’t even fucking well do that.
On her father (she was his biographer):
Ben: Only one piece of Holst will be remembered. One piece played all over the world. And everything else – however much it was fussed over and petted and promoted by his beloved daughter – every other piece – slung in the rubble with the rest of all the not good enough art.
Britten will never be the same, not that I ever liked him. I will also add that I have multiple copies (I just checked: eight) of The Planets. And I do know Holst’s ballet The Perfect Fool, and the atmospheric Thomas Hardy tribute, Egdon Heath.
The play is amusing too. Britten flies into fury when the Lord Chamberlain eliminates chamber pots from the opera which is set in the 16th century with the story of Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex, so BC (before Crapper). Then it’s funny on Britten previewing the opera for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at the palace. I suspect the playwright is correct in his assessment of their dull eyed watching. After all, they had to sit through so much enforced ‘entertainment’ which was not of their choice. Opera, Ballet, Royal Variety shows, Last Night of the Proms, military tattoos, children’s choirs, church music. Apparently later the Queen and Queen Mother were fond of Britten and his music though.
There is something quintessentially English about the play and the characters, a point frozen in time. Maybe that is its appeal.
Acting direction is first rate, though in a couple of sequences, I thought those few at the side on stage right would have been looking at backs for a long time. Fortunately we were central. As time went on, I realised it’s very well-written. I also noticed the use of emphatic shall / shan’t (as in You shan’t …)which is designed to give a sense of the period.
Overall? Karen, ever into acting reckons an easy four star. Me? Ever into production, would give the actors five, but the intrinsic play three, and the production decision to stage it in The Swan, just one. Plus it was ludicrously over-priced but after much discussion… it wasn’t ‘theatrical’ enough for me for a four, but it is very good.
***
PS: Full marks to the RSC at selling the play text for £8, rather than the list £10.99. You can afford to do this, and then people buy it there rather than going online later.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
4 star
Suzy Feay, Financial Times, ****
Raphael Kohn, All That Dazzles, ****
3 star
Arifa Akbar, Guardian ***
Sophie Eaton, West End Best Friend ***
Holly Williams, The Stage ***
2 star
Fiona Mountford, Telegraph **
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
ERICA WHYMAN (Director)
Hamnet, RSC 2023
The Winter’s Tale (filmed), RSC 2021
Miss Littlewood, by Sam Kenyon, RSC 2018
Romeo & Juliet, RSC 2018
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, RSC 2016 (Bear Pit Company)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, RSC 2016 (Belvoir Players)
Hecuba by Marina Carr, RSC, 2015
SAMUEL BARNETT
Rock Follies, Chichester 2023 (Harry)
Richard III, Globe / West End 2012 (Queen Elizabeth)
Twelfth Night, Globe / West End 2012 (Sebastian)
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