CORONATION, COMMISSION, COLLABORATION
You need not be a selfish pig to be an artist of genius, but there’s no question that it often helps. Occurs, anyway. In Mark Ravenhill’s exhilarating two-hander Benjamin Britten knows his own habit, one recognizable to many who worked with him (not least the young boy stars, mentored then dismissed) . “I find a person, enchant the person. Pull the person in closer, until they’re in love with me. ..”I think often I’m in love with them back. Then one day suddenly I despise them. Their weakness in being easily enchanted. I try to push them away. they’re too deep in. So I draw on my cruelty..break them..”.
“You won’t get me”says Imogen Holst lightly, arriving as his “musical assistant” for the absurdly short nine-month deadline in which he must write the opera “Gloriana” about Elizabeth I for Queen Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation. But we know she will be “got” , for all her bravura and brilliance. She is too generous, too respectful of the reality of his gift, not to be made vulnerable. Holst was a blithe and lovely figure in her own right, who expertly supported her famous father Gustav for years and now in her forties had turned to educating amateurs, forming community choirs, collecting folksong, spreading music. But there was no room for another important figure in the 39-year-old Britten’s universe: nervously ambitious, tasked to do a national “duty” in this “new Elizabethan” age he was both flattered and terrified.
The role of amanuensis as nanny, foil and innocent challenger is beautifully caught by Victoria Yeates as Imo: breezy, brisk, tweedy, travelling light, living sparely but caught delightedly in moments of musical joy – she dances like a fiend to inspire the galliard and morris of the court scenes. Samuel Barnett as Britten deploys a chilly light-tenor petulance covering his real fear of failure; this curdles at times to breathtakingly vicious spite, something Ravenhill as a writer relishes no end. Barnett gives it full, full value: you cringe. The real Holst made veiled references later to things Britten said to her, to terrible to repeat or bear to remember. The play brings that to life, fortissimo, in a crashing final scene: no spoilers, but a final monosyllable from Holst had women in the audience hissing “Yessss!!!”
It’s a gripping couple of hours, watching them work in taut brief scenes; they quarrel, sometimes meet like real friends sharing ideas (though Britten will suddenly panic and refuse to admit that any were hers: his proprietoral attitude to the idea of a small boy dancing is frankly edgy). Softened by drink they laugh together: once he crashes on the piano keyboard as “Wagner after six rums” while she capers as Brunnhilde with a lampshade on her head. She often picks him up from despair, but when his inspiration suddenly begins to flow freely he blocks her out. Soutra Gilmour’s design gives grand dramatic effects to Erica Whyman’s production; a low light sometimes throwing the piano as a great menacing battleship shadow on the bricks, the sound of the Aldeburgh seas crashing, Imogen’s wild morris-dance spinning her into darkness.
Behind it all is the artistically perilous absurdity of the whole project: Lord Harewood and Kenneth Clarke demanding an instant new-Elizabethan renaissance (shades of all those unspeakably ghastly “Cultural Olympiad” subsidised events in 2012). Britten, though he knows finally that “Gloriana” will be an honourable failure, buys into this but regrets it, hating every new arrangement or suggestion from above, especially if it involves some bete noire like poor Frederick Ashton. There are moments when I think Ravenhill is mourning our current government philistinism and arts cuts, but the the 1953 dream is skewered in one of Barnett’s last speeches. He predicts “a new hunger for music, the government spending proper money on the arts, great buildings, enormous sensational national arts, huge great audiences of thousands upon thousands – brought together by their dullness. I don’t want any of it. Back to Aldeburgh, writing for my friends. With our little opera group every year looking glumly at its pocket book with figures written in red ink. Hand to mouth. I’m not a national person, I’m a local person”.
He didn’t, of course, predict that sixty years on, cut upon cut would mean that even the great national companies are staring at red ink.
Rsc.org.uk. To. 6 APril.
Rating 4
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