Gloriana - review

If the Royal Opera was ever going to return to the work it commissioned from Benjamin Britten for the 1953 coronation, then this was the year, an opportunity to mark both the 60th anniversary of that royal event as well as the Britten centenary. Though claimed as a box-office success at the time of its premiere, and revived the following season at Covent Garden, history has not subsequently been kind to Gloriana. Richard Jones's new staging, a co-production with the Hamburg Opera where it opened two months ago, is only the fourth in Britain since, and it has been seen very much as the problematic poor relation among Britten's operas.

Jones and his designer, Ultz, do their best to disguise those problems. Like their Glyndebourne Falstaff, revived last month, they make it an exercise in post-second world war nostalgia. This opera about the first queen Elizabeth is presented as a historical pageant put on in a municipal hall somewhere in England (Aldeburgh's Jubilee Hall perhaps?) to mark the coronation of Elizabeth II, where it's performed in front of the newly crowned queen herself. Throughout the performance, the trappings of am-dram are ever present: producer, prompter and St John Ambulance man hover in the wings, a local musical teacher conducts the choir; there's some suitably naff dancing, while in the Norwich scene (a pageant within a pageant within an opera as it becomes here) the royal monogram is spelt out in vegetables, as if at a harvest festival.

It's all done with a witty, light touch, but it is sometimes distracting, and when the opera itself becomes more psychologically fraught in the third act, when the ageing, failing Elizabeth finally condemns Essex to death, the layers and frames do blunt the impact of what is already a fairly unfocussed dramatic trajectory. In the end, the problems of the work, most of them stemming from William Plomer's clunking libretto with its self-conscious, unsingable archaisms – "Call me not malapert" is one glaring example – are never really disguised.

Musically it's good enough. Paul Daniel conducts, though he cannot do much about the passages in which Britten's attempts at combining private emotion with public ceremony don't quite hit the mark, and there are a few too many of those.

The individual performances are more variable. As Elizabeth, Susan Bullock is rather disappointing, with little of the presence, vocally or dramatically, that the role demands, so that her central relationship with Toby Spence's dashing, impulsive Essex never snaps into focus. Clive Bayley's understatedly sinister Raleigh is the pick of the creepy conspiring courtiers; Mark Stone's Mountjoy and Patricia Bardon as Essex's wife, Frances, provide the sympathetic counterbalance, while Brindley Sherratt's Blind Ballad Singer is a superb cameo.

There's some fine choral singing, too; but, as a reminder in this year of significant anniversaries that not everything the finest composers produced is equally successful, it's a salutary evening.

In rep until 6 July (box office: 020-7304 4000); broadcast live in cinemas on 24 June and on Radio 3 on 29 June.

See also

Peter Skinner on his role in the original 1953 production
Susan Bullock writes about Britten's opera