A Claustrophobic Billy Budd with a Much Anticipated Role Debut

LONDON—Michael Grandage’s 2010 staging of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd made a welcome return to Glyndebourne June 28 with a consistently fine cast and Allan Clayton making an anticipated role debut as the conflicted Captain Vere. It looks goods, the score sounds terrific under the capable baton of Nicholas Carter, and if it sometimes feels like the three principal portrayals are a work in progress, as an exposé of the British navy in straightened times, it offers plenty of bang for your King’s shilling.

Premiered in 1951, Billy Budd is one of Britten’s most effortlessly fluent scores. Herman Melville’s tale of a ship’s captain caught in a battle to the death between the forces of good and evil, and yet who proves unable to prevent the good being destroyed, is a story rich in symbolism. It also contains noted homoerotic elements given its all-male cast and the repeated equivalence of handsomeness (i.e. manliness and physical beauty) with goodness. How far to push the allegorical elements is a director’s challenge and one that is met here by Grandage with admirable restraint.

This was the British theater director’s first foray into opera and his typically character-driven approach paid dividends. With a setting that remained true to the work’s intentions, he laid bare both the brutality and the camaraderie of life below decks on a Napoleonic-era man-o-war. The controversial element was the absence of the sea. The action was set entirely below decks with only the occasional officer peering offstage through a telescope to suggest the outside world. By enclosing the Glyndebourne stage top to bottom in Christopher Oram’s shadowy wooden gunwales, the HMS Indomitable became more jailhouse than ship, a world where the crew was treated as inmates and intimidated into submission by non-commissioned officers resembling prison guards.

It was a risky approach, at its least effective when the men mustered on deck to take a pop at a French frigate. It also defeated the sense of Billy as foretopman (“King of the birds,” he sings), his post high above the decks looking down on his mates emphasizing Melville’s angel metaphor. The grimy, smoke-filled belly of the beast, however, stunningly lit by Paule Constable, was a claustrophobic’s nightmare, a sweltering pressure cooker where passions ran high. Scrupulously revived by Ian Rutherford, the principal cast and Glyndebourne Chorus made you smell the blood, sweat, and fear. The novice’s graphically bloodied body made total sense of his subsequent corruptibility at the hands of the unscrupulous master-at-arms, while several male-on-male clinches suggested an erotic ambiguity. The nascent mutiny after Billy’s hanging was visceral, its vicious putting down by the ship’s soldiers all too familiar in a modern world where a handful of government enforcers are allowed to cow a group of protesters through threats and violence.

Thomas Mole captured Billy’s essential sweetness as well as his innocence and—clambering athletically down the walls from top to bottom—his boundless enthusiasm. The voice was essentially all there, the top easy going, the middle register expressive. What he lacked at times was sheer firepower. While the famous “Billy in the darbies” scene—the word is an old-fashioned British slang term for handcuffs—was eloquently sung, his interjections as the chorus sang out in praise of “Starry Vere” were sometimes unheard.

A fine singing actor, Clayton will make an outstanding Vere in a year or so, or perhaps in a less constraining production. Trussed up in navy uniform and formal wig (it was noticeable how much freer he became in the brief moments he was allowed to take it off), he seemed more figurehead than man of action, making it hard to imagine the “Starry Vere” for whom his men would willingly give their lives. With vocal clarity, he drew you into the opening dilemma of an old man reviewing a historic inability to act, which he fears will be his legacy. He was equally moving at the end when, whether you believe he’s exonerated or not, he senses redemption in Billy’s final blessing. His scenes before and after Claggart's murder were compelling, and yet you never quite felt the class tension he struggles so hard to diffuse taking wine with his officers.

As Claggart, Sam Carl was hampered by being too young for a man who boasts of his many years of service (“I’ve seen many men, many years have I given to the King, sailed many seas”). To compensate, he tended to move too fast and too much where stillness and menace ought to have been his weapons of choice. He nevertheless came over as a nasty piece of work, but not as Melville’s irresistible Satanic force. Vocally, the lower register was excellent, his bottom notes ringing true in phrases such as “do they think I’m deaf” and, when told that the novice can no longer walk, the chilling “let him crawl.” Higher up, the volume came and went.

Among several outstanding performances, Dingle Yandell delivered a clarion Mr. Redburn, the dynamic First Lieutenant, with William Thomas lugubrious as Mr. Flint, the Indomitable’s Sailing Master. Their “Don’t like the French” duet came as welcome comic relief. Among Billy’s shipmates, Samuel Dale Johnson was a solid Donald and Daniel Norman a nimble Squeak. Clive Bayley delivered a resonant and smartly observed portrait of the veteran sailor Dansker, while Alasdair Elliott (now in his 70s) cast a characterful spell as Red Whiskers, his singing full of personality and unfazed by a role that sits perilously high. Laurence Kilsby sang radiantly as the unfortunate novice, with a mellow-toned Alex Otterburn sympathetic as his friend.

In the pit, Nicholas Carter drew a pacy, dramatically astute, and colorful performance from the London Philharmonic, raising Britten’s orchestral interludes to the level of their equivalents in Peter Grimes. The muster scene was overwhelmingly powerful, and yet not a line was lost despite the vast scale of the forces on stage (the powder monkeys from Glyndebourne Youth Opera and midshipmen from Tiffin Boys’ Choir were especially impressive). All in all, a highly welcome revival.

From the top: Allan Clayton as an aging Captain Vere; Thomas Mole and Clive Bayley as Billy and Dansker; Sam Carl and Daniel Norman as Claggart and Squeak

_{Photos by Tristram Kenton}