Paul Bunyan (Benjamin Britten, libretto by W.H.Auden) Moppet Pamela Helen Stephen Poppet Lea-Marian Jones Fido Nicole Tibbels Narrator Peter Coleman-Wright Paul Bunyan Kenneth Cranham Western Union Boy Henry Moss Hel Helson Jeremy White Sam Sharkey Francis Egerton Ben Benny Graeme Broadbent Johnny Inkslinger Thomas Randle Tiny Susan Gritton Hot Biscuit Slim Mark Padmore Conductor Richard Hickox Director Francesca Zambello This is the first professional staging of Britten and Auden's last collaboration, which is also Britten's first substantial work of music theatre. Amazingly, the Royal Opera has got something of more than curiosity value here. It's very entertaining, quite moving in the end, and a bit odd. As a work, Paul Bunyan is triangulated between inter-war European music theatre, Broadway musical and modern opera, between Mahagonny, Oklahoma and The Rake's Progress or Peter Grimes. The libretto wavers between pastiche of Gershwin, Cole Porter and Moss Hart, and a camped up version of Auden's pre-war voice (there's a recyled bit of Stop all the clocks...). The music reconstructs almost every imaginable genre of music-theatre, from the bluesy Weill-style Quartet of the defeated via operetta arias and a duet for the lovers to the cats' morality, which looks forward to the reinvented baroque of the Beggar's Opera. The plot is minimal: the giant Bunyan is born when the moon turns blue, gathers a team of immigrant loggers and presides over the conquest of nature and the birth of civilization and commerce in America. Others become part of the group, and all eventually move on to other, more typically American, lives after the forests are cut down. Hot Biscuit Slim the cook falls in love with Bunyan's daughter Tiny (Britten's only unproblematic lovers ever, I think). Johnny Inkslinger the accountant works, at first grudgingly, as Bunyan's administrator and eventually goes off to work in the movies. (Inkslinger seems to be a stand-in for Auden.) Hel Helson, the thuggish and stupid foreman, rebels against Bunyan, loses to him in a fight (followed by a mock funeral related to "Poor Judd is dead") and eventually goes to Washington. As in Britten's later Church parables, the main scenes are of eating and celebration. An odd notes is struck by an English-schoolboy obsession with nasty food, prepared by the two cooks who can only do soup and beans. Paul Bunyan is never seen, only heard, and his pervasive presence (equated with the landscape itself at times) provides a spiritual background for comic shennanigans. The dog Fido and cats Moppet and Poppet and various other small beasties likewise serve as moralizing or satirical commentators. In the finale, the cats perform a litany (on an Anglican psalm-tone): From a Pressure Group that says I am the Constitution From those who say Patriotism and mean Persecution From a tolerance that is really inertia and disillusion... Save us. The staging is very simple -- an abstract backcloth representing the horizion at various times of day, and some equally abstract wooden objects (mainly various sized logs). The costumes are "pioneer", but in quiet colours and slightly odd-looking, to avoid the Seven brides for seven brothers effect. The trees and geese in the prologue and the animals all wear human costume, but act in character. The generally young cast didn't quite deliver the Broadway elements, but most of them got close. Susan Gritton could probably deliver a torch song in style, and she managed to be cute as well. Mark Padmore also nearly made it. (There is a great photograph of him as The milky bar kid in the program.) Peter Coleman-Wright was excellent as the balladeer narrator, as was Thomas Randle as Johnny Inkslinger. The Western Union Boy did a camp chorus-boy routine rather badly, but the audience thought it was wonderful. If the voices slipped into operatic style, and the accents bombed out occasionally, that's probably about right for two Englishmen's slighty screwy view of America that gets the manner and spirit perfectly but misses some of the details. And in the end, the chorus, in more conventionally operatic style, held everything together, expressing a communitarian vision that nurtures the individuals who emerge. The tenor Francis Egerton, who sang Sam Sharkey, got a tweny-five year award from Nicholas Kenyon after the performance. He actually sang his first role for the Royal opera in 1970 (Osric in Kenneth Stead's Hamlet, which had only one performance ever), and Kenyon got a laugh by saying "We're not very good at counting at Covent Garden". Mr Egerton deserved it, of course -- he's a wonderful character tenor. But I cynically wonder if they weren't trying to emulate the warm and furries that the ENO have been getting by appealing to their audiences to preserve them from Covent Garden.