All at sea | 2 May 2019

The climactic central scene of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd ends unexpectedly. The naval court has reached a verdict of death, and Captain Vere must depart to tell Billy his fate. Voices fall silent, the stage empties, and for two whole minutes the unseen drama is distilled into just 34 chords. And not sprawling elbowfuls of notes either, but plain old triads — the child’s building blocks of harmony.

It’s wilfully, maddeningly ambiguous and utterly inspired. It’s also a touchstone for any performance — the moment the opera reveals itself either as a parable, groping gradually but surely towards redemption, or a darker tale of the indiscriminate cruelty of fate.

Deborah Warner’s Billy Budd cruises into Covent Garden from Madrid and most recently Rome, its sails billowing full with praise and awards. You can see why. Michael Levine’s designs, lovingly lit by Jean Kalman, are airy and architectural — less a ship than the idea of a ship. An endlessly evolving space articulated by swaying ropes and moving walkways, its unfixedness offers a telling contrast to the rigid hierarchy and stratification of life on the ‘floating prison’ of the Indomitable.

Warner, like Britten, is less interested in the sweaty, salty realities of 18th-century seafaring than in the social and psychological landscape of this ‘tiny floating fragment of earth’. She crews it with care in a fine ensemble cast, many of whom have been with the production since its 2016 première.

But oddly, given this long gestation, there’s little sense of community. Backlit scenes reduce individuals to silhouettes, a faceless mass where they should be vivid character sketches. A non-specifically 20th-century updating confuses matters further, blunting the story’s explicitly Napoleonic situation (which comes ready-charged with revolution and recent mutinies) without offering much in return.