English National Opera’s production of Billy Budd originated in Wales seven years ago, and is also shared with Opera Australia. Neil Armfield is the producer, and the set design is by Brian Thomson. It is an hydraulic platform, which in Cardiff occupied the whole stage, but at the Coliseum leaves a lot of surrounding space unused, and induces less claustrophobia in the audience, though it could well, in its restless heaving, cause motion sickness. It is highly unspecific, so serves, with one or two props, all the purposes it needs to and leaves the creation of atmosphere mainly to the music and the singers, so that is in good hands. Given the extremely high level of the musical performance and the acting, I was somewhat taken aback by the lesser impact that it had than in Cardiff. I think that is perhaps to be put down almost entirely to the intimacy of the Theatre Royal and the big distances of the Coliseum. Possibly the WNO chorus sang with even more stunning attack than the augmented chorus of ENO, but there is very little in it. The individual roles are without exception impressively realised, with John Tomlinson giving one of his best performances as a black-voiced Hagen-Claggart, and Timothy Robinson persuasive as the younger Vere, if not so much in the framing sections of meditation.
A more complex reason for the diminution in power I felt at the ENO’s performance may be that its superiority in one central respect actually showed more clearly a failure in the opera itself. That was the performance of the title role. In Cardiff in 1998 it was taken creditably but hardly with charisma. At the Coliseum it is taken by a great singer-actor, whose utterly convincing identification with the role brings into sharp focus the unease which this work creates, even more than others of Britten in which innocence is destroyed or corrupted — he delights in both, and in The Rape of Lucretia and The Turn of the Screw leaves it open whether both are to be found in the same person; but the peculiar pathos of Billy Budd is that the hero remains radiantly, almost superhumanly innocent, brought down by one evil monster and one man who adores him but unjustly sentences him to death.
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