★★★☆☆
You only have to look at a picture of Benjamin Britten and WH Auden to suss the dynamic. If they were schoolboys, Britten would be the bookish one with a side parting, beetling off for cocoa when a sneaky Auden offers him a puff on a cigarette round the back of the bike shed. A creative odd couple is born.
Having collaborated on the sarcastic cantata Our Hunting Fathers, the two men had (separately) left Britain before the Second World War to avoid nasty nationalism and potential conscription. Safely in New York, in Paul Bunyan they now thought they would try a Broadway musical.
The result is actually a lot stranger than that, as this first staging of the 1941 piece by English