Once again the company has bailed out the board. As in January 2003, when Khovanshchina signalled English National Opera's highest artistic intent at a time of crisis, Saturday's performance of Billy Budd set its latest problems in perspective. In spite of last week's bloodless coup, which saw Sean Doran, ENO's inexperienced artistic director, replaced by two of his deputies, the show went on - brilliantly. No opera company deserves two defenestrations in three years: it's an outrageously expensive way of dealing with chief executives. Vernon Ellis, ENO's vice-chairman, says he actually admires Doran, that there is no financial black hole and that we have reason to feel positive about the company's prospects. Why then did the board fail to support Doran when he most needed it, just as he was getting his feet under the job?
Britten's naval opera is often seen as a portrait of a brutal establishment crushing a pretty innocent. Such simplistic thinking - shorthand for the way Britten and other homosexuals were treated 50 years ago is quickly drowned by the tidal force of Neil Armfield's staging. This Budd, first staged in Wales in 1998, is no parable of innocence and corruption. With Captain Vere at its centre, trapped between poles of good and evil, it proposes a murkier dilemma: the conflict between justice of the law and justice of the heart. And by identifying Claggart's homoerotic thoughts in Act 1 as he smells Billy's handkerchief, it establishes the master-at-arms's destructive power. Claggart's feelings for the lusty lad open a chink of vulnerability, something his regime of brutal repression cannot tolerate. That is why love turns to hate.
By opting for an abstract setting, Armfield and his designers, Brian Thomson, Carl Friedrich Oberle and Nigel Levings, focus unremittingly on character and motive. But by giving the officers Napoleonic-era uniform, they keep the drama anchored in its maritime/historical context. Andrew Litton conducts a performance of beautifully calibrated energy, underlining the quality of ENO's ensemble. Simon Keenlyside is still lithe enough to portray "baby Budd's" youthful high spirits, as definitive a portrait as John Tomlinson's Hagen-like Claggart. Timothy Robinson is the poised but weedy Vere, Gwynne Howell a Dansker of heart-warming humanity.
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