Billy Budd is not an opera that allows a director a huge amount of dramatic licence. It’s hard to imagine a production that dispensed with the nautical connections altogether, but Orpha Phelan’s new staging for Opera North shows few signs of pushing anywhere near to the boundaries of what Britten’s scenario defines.
Though there’s little hint of the sea in designer Leslie Travers’ set – a panelled room, whose front wall provides a backdrop to Captain Vere’s prologue before lifting and tilting to reveal a two-level walkway made from ships’ timbers – the costumes fix the action firmly in the British navy at the end of the 18th century. The action generally goes strictly by the book, too, though Phelan does invent a wrestling bout for Red Whiskers and Billy when the crew are off duty in the third scene. But that turns out to be one of the few moments when the show generates any energy. Even the skirmish with a French ship at the beginning of the second act is presented like a static tableau, with little attempt to conjure the bustle of a crew preparing for battle. Perhaps the pervading inertia is deliberate, a means of signalling that these events are being retrieved from the recesses of Vere’s fading memory, but that seems doubtful.
Garry Walker and the Opera North Orchestra deliver the score with subfusc efficiency too, rather than the real excitement that some of Britten’s greatest orchestral music needs, though some segments will surely improve as the run continues – the famous passage of chords during which Vere tells Billy of his death sentence was distinctly untidy on the first night. A similar sense of efficient routine runs through most of the individual performances too, with just a couple of notable exceptions. As Billy, Roderick Williams did not seem quite the finished article: the various elements in his portrayal – the journey from the naive exuberance of his arrival on the Indomitable to his introspective acceptance of his fate the night before his execution – don’t yet cohere as they surely will. But much of his singing is touchingly sincere and, as always, constantly sensitive to every nuance of the text.
Alan Oke’s Vere, though, is already a richly complex portrayal, which combines personal diffidence with unswerving authority, delivered in phrases that sometimes uncannily recall the inflection of Peter Pears, for whom the role was written. It’s never easy to construe Vere as sympathetic, but Oke almost manages it in his final, shuffling appearance in the epilogue. Alastair Miles’s Claggart is much less convincing – a saturnine rather than genuinely malevolent presence, and without the necessary edge of darkness in his singing to make his unreasoning hatred of Billy convincing.
There are some decent cameos dotted among the rest of the cast too – Stephen Richardson’s Dansker is a bit more than that – and the Opera North chorus do everything that is asked of them, while still having plenty in reserve. With more dramatic energy applied in the right places, the production could yet come alive.
- In rep at the Grand theatre, Leeds, until 29 October. Box office: 0844-848 2700. Then touring until 3 December.
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