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Visual poetry in short supply … Roderick Williams in Britten’s War Requiem.
Visual poetry in short supply … Roderick Williams in Britten’s War Requiem. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Visual poetry in short supply … Roderick Williams in Britten’s War Requiem. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

War Requiem review – staging Britten's choral masterpiece brings uncertain rewards

This article is more than 5 years old

Coliseum, London
Superb soloists lift this over-busy English National Opera production, securely conducted by Martyn Brabbins and featuring scenery by Wolfgang Tillmans

‘I hope it’ll make people think a bit,” wrote Benjamin Britten of the War Requiem, the work that marked the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962. Read his quote with a pause afterwards for the understatement to thud home. Love or hate the War Requiem, you can’t be unaffected by the way in which Britten’s music enables the collision of the Latin requiem mass with Wilfred Owen’s poetry. Even a bad performance makes you think. And this one, with the forces of English National Opera securely conducted by Martyn Brabbins, is a very long way from that.

But whether the piece benefits from being staged is less certain, even after everything ENO’s artistic director Daniel Kramer and the Turner prize-winning photographer Wolfgang Tillmans throw at it. Kramer’s staging is fleetingly inspired but more often frustratingly busy and literal. Three huge screens are the only scenery, with Tillmans’ images ranging through nature, pollution, what might be football violence, a 1924 pacifist book and, strangest, a banner ad for the Remembering Srebrenica website, the last making the stage look like a conference platform. There’s an unforgettable moment when snow falling in the air is lit for a split second like a mushroom cloud. Generally, though, such visual poetry is in short supply.

Fleetingly inspired … Daniel Kramer’s staging of War Requiem with Wolfgang Tillmans’ scenery images. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

And what about the spatial possibilities afforded by the opera-house setting? Having distance between the different groups of performers was important to Britten, but the only nod to that idea here comes when the excellent Finchley Children’s Music Group sing offstage and high up for the final pages. The adult chorus amplifies the regular ENO ensemble with the company created for the just-finished run of Porgy and Bess – formidable, but they rarely get the chance to hit us with their full sound as they shuffle between tableaux of conflict and its aftermath, or lie down to play dead. The soloists make the performance. Soprano Emma Bell brings steely desperation to the Lacrimosa, and both tenor David Butt Philip and baritone Roderick Williams are superb throughout.

At Coliseum, London, until 7 December.

Spatial possibilities … Britten’s War Requiem. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

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