Captain Vere         Kim Begley
First mate              Christoper Keyte
Second mate          Brian Secombe
Mr Flint                 Stephen Richardson
Bosun                    Keel Watson
Donald                   Adrian Clarke
Maintop                 Peter Auty
Novice                   Timothy Robinson
Squeak                  Richard Coxon
Mr Redburn          Alan Opie
Lt Ratcliffe             Graeme Broadbent
John Claggart        Eric Halvarson
Red Whiskers       Francis Egerton
Arthur Jones         Jonathan Coad
Billy Budd             Simon Keenlyside
Dansker                Conal Coad
Cabin Boy             Alex Knox

Conductor Richard Hickox
Director Francesca Zambello
Revival director Christian Raeth

Royal Opera Chorus, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

As several of the programme notes point out, the stereotype of the
beauteous British sailor is a below-decks Patroclus with his entire fellow
crew as Achilles. By the time Britten wrote Billy Budd, the patriotically
loaded image of the beloved British tar of manly beauty and virtue had
actually degenerated (via Noel Coward in comic mode) into a smutty joke.
But HMS Pinafore and Tom Bowling in the National Songbook kept the polite
version in play, and no-one would ever suspect Britten of joking.

As it is, it is easy these days to make Billy Budd look like an arty porn
film, and any redemption to be found in a performance tends to come from
artiness. The trouble is, it is made so much like a film. It has a range of
small roles that set the scene at the beginning, a couple of recurring
smaller roles like the bosun, a flashback structure from the point of view
of a character’s older self, and a climax in the third act that
precipitates the crisis in the fourth. And the music is slightly off-kilter
romanticism, like Korngold turned around twenty degrees, with weird
hornpipes bubbling under and big sea-swell roars. If you don’t come from
the ideological background it assumes, it looks terribly closed and
limited.

The enjoyment to be found in Billy Budd is purely (so to speak) in the
interest in the mass of men bonded below decks, and in the hormonal
overloading of their choruses. And although there have been a handful of
pretty good films based in one way or another on Billy Budd, Zambello seems
to make the cruel gaze that looks at the suffering flesh into a one-tone
fetish. Why do we want to watch the sailors being bullied as they scrub the
decks? The sea shanty music is both redemptive for them and enjoyable for
us, but the skin and testosterone suggest voyeurism. This production has
been described as coolly oppressive, because of its dark colours and close
packed groupings, but it is also narrow in its emotional interest.

Richard Hickox and the Royal Opera House orchestra, rescued the production
from complete obsession with battered flesh by avoiding sentiment and
keeping everything taut, even formal. The singers similarly avoided excess,
except perhaps for Eric Halvarson, who played Claggart as a melodrama
heavy. Kim Begley as Vere was so understated he didn’t make much impact,
while Tim Robinson was strikingly masochistic as the Novice. Simon
Keenlyside was sweet and graceful as Billy, crucifying himself on the mast
and also hanging stoically for ten minutes or so in a harness at the end.
His two monologues before his death had the only complex emotion in the
performance, except, perhaps, for the rich, self-absorbed pain of the
chorus.