Lady Billows Rebecca Nash Florence Pike Rahel Wagner Miss Wordsworth Sarah Fox Mr Gedge Nyle Wolf Mr Upfold Stephen Brown Superintendent Budd Andrew Foster Sid Leigh Melrose Albert Herring Ian Yemm Nancy Ebba Wallin Mrs Herring Miriam Murphy Emmie Zaira Castro-Ortiz Cis Ludmilla Marchadier Harry Alan Young Conductor Michael Rosewall Producer Mike Ashman Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra This production, in the Britten Theatre at the Royal College of Music, was for the London Royal Schools Vocal Faculty, a postgraduate programme for young professional singers and recent graduates. The excellent cast that I saw was one of two. It was interesting to see Albert Herring soon after the Royal Opera Paul Bunyan. It's strikingly similar in the way it combines mythical archetypes and the comedy of everyday reality. Both emphasise food (in Herring, it's the fruit that was unavailable in the post-war years when it was written), and both include a cheerful heterosexual romantic couple and a mock/mistaken threnody. The main difference is, of course, that Eric Crozier was completely at home in the linguistic and social idioms of the small Norfolk village that he used in Albert Herring, whereas Auden, in spite of some felicitous moments, was all at sea with American idioms in Paul Bunyan. The mythological angle is built into the plot. Lady Billows ("an elderly autocrat"), resurrects the ancient custom of the May Queen, and tries to turn it into a festival of chastity. Failing to find a suitable young woman in the area, she is persuaded by the local worthies to have Albert Herring, the dim, mother-dominated youth from the greengrocers, as the May King. Sid and Nancy, the cheerful lovers, spike Albert's lemonade with rum at the tea party, and he goes awol. His orange-blossom crown is found crushed by a cart, and everyone believes he is dead, and mourns him in their own way. Albert returns, with a story of vague but undoubtedly scandalous excesses -- only alcohol is mentioned explicitly, but there is clearly more. He stands up to him mother at last, kisses Nancy and lets the children loose on the fruit in the greengrocers. As well as the May festival, there's Edenic fruit, and Dionysiac death and resurrection. And one of Albert's prizes for his purity is Fox's Martyrs, hinting that he is also a parody virgin martyr. You could say that the story of the machinations of oppression leading to ecstasy is the basis of all martyr narratives. The original production was set near the start of the century. Mike Ashman's production, as he mentions in the programme, takes up the similarity with the Ealing comedies that were being made during and just after the war, and sets the work at the time it was written. This works really well, because it provides an easy way in to the magical realism of the plot and music. (It seems strange attributing magical realism to Britten, but it's here all right.) The set was fairly simple, with the oddity that the walls of the shop were painted with a trompe l'oeil beach, suggesting a confusion of indoors and out that isn't really present in the opera. Albert doesn't really envision a great outdoors while he's in the shop, or bring the outer world back when he returns -- he just takes control of what's inside. The performances were all very good. Ian Yemm as Albert sang beautifully, and managed to look dim but just a touch demonic when appropriate. The worthies and Rahel Wagner as Miss Pike, the uptight housekeeper, all got their characters in detail and sang well, and Ebba Wallin was a charming and sympathetic Nancy. But the outstanding performances were the two monstrous censoring women, Rebecca Nash as Lady Billows and Miriam Murphy as Mrs Herring. Murphy has a huge and beautiful mezzo, and was seriously scary as Albert's oppressive Mum. Nash did Lady Billows as Margaret Rutherford to a T, and sang her grand soprano line impressively. This characterization of Lady B, though fully in the spirit of the libretto and music, points to a problem that recurrs in Britten's opera's. In Ealing comedies, and in life, tweedy upper and upper-middle class English ladies are generally a force for anarchy and subversion. (I'm going to be like that when I grow up.) Someone like Lady Billows in this production would be more likely to be quoting Miss Weston on fertility symbols in the May Day rituals. As with the governess in The turn of the screw, and arguably Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes, women with an element of power or responsibility are depicted as suffocating monsters of repression. Still, I think in the case of Lady B, it's partly a matter of class rather than gender -- and I suppose Mrs Herring is basically petit bourgeois as well, so we can put it down to Crozier's Marxism in this case.