Preachy prig

Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, has always been the Cinderella in that area of his work, and the production of it at the Linbury Studio in the Royal Opera House is unlikely to change that. Britten wrote it for presentation on BBC television, and took very seriously the possibilities and limitations which that medium possesses — one of the very few composers who has done. Naturally, he was eager to have it produced on stage, too, presumably so that the music could be heard live instead of in what was then the fairly poor sound that TV offered. But it doesn’t really work on the stage, not even in so intimate if uncomfortable a space as the Linbury. It was quite wrong of Hans Keller to write of the work as ‘the televisual opera which, quite obviously, was planned, behind television’s front, as a work that would, ultimately, be heard where all opera ought to be heard if it wants fully to retain its musical allegiances: in the opera house’. It just doesn’t ‘go’ on the stage, especially set pieces such as the dinner party at the end of Act I, where we should focus on the characters in turn in a way that is hard or impossible in the theatre.

This latest production, by Tim Hopkins, more or less admits its own incapacities by having a couple of cameramen projecting images on to the backdrop, so that we get distracting close-ups or alternative things to look at, and attention is divided; even more when Hopkins decided on a split-level stage, with no clear indications of which one is the more important. It enables him to indulge in some coups de théâtre which don’t add much to the piece, and strike one as an attempt to inject vitality into something that evidently lacks it.