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Normally art that’s about art irritates me but Mark Ravenhill’s play, depicting Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst giving agonizing birth to the grand opera Gloriana for the 1953 Coronation, is gradually enthralling. Erica Whyman’s efficient production for the Royal Shakespeare Company features a fine performance from Samuel Barnett as the twitchy, petulant composer, and a captivating one from Victoria Yeates as the brisk, no-nonsense Holst, who proves far more than a mere handmaiden to genius.
Holst disparaged her own talents as a composer, musician and conductor to curate her father Gustav’s legacy and to research and promote community music and dance, before devoting herself to Britten for over two decades. Here she turns up at his leaky Aldeburgh cottage, brim-full of the promise of the new Elizabethan age and the mission of the newly founded Arts Council to fund culture for the people. Even though she hasn’t got a job title, a defined role, or a salary.
Britten meanwhile is torn. On the one hand his vanity and sense of duty are flattered by the commission, and he’s tickled by the idea of celebrating the new Queen with a majestic work about her eponymous predecessor. On the other, he’s far happier composing smaller stories with and for an elite clique of like-minded friends, centring on his muse and life partner, the tenor Peter Pears. The play is not just about how art is made but who it is for and whether it should be publicly funded.
Ravenhill largely avoids the cliches of frustrated composition, thank goodness – the crossings out, the hurling of the manuscript across the room – and instead shows how Britten’s struggle to create manifests itself in his relationship to Holst. Britten prevaricates, fusses and feuds with rivals (the dripping contempt with which Barnett invests the name of the Royal Ballet’s Ninette de Valois is something to hear). He develops hypochondriac complaints and suffers emotional collapses before writing in splurge of productivity.
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He warns Holst early on that he’ll seduce her into friendship then thrust her away, and so it proves. Barnett swings from boyish charm to sulky neediness to terrifying, corrosive rage. The tweedy Holst is the still, solid point around which his extreme moods rage, at least until she breaks down near the end.
Her passion for her art (and, it transpires, for her past lovers) is driven by a sort of gung-ho, jolly-hockey-sticks pragmatism which is almost impossible to portray convincingly: Yeates manages it beautifully, even while dancing a galliard and then a morris, culottes billowing, for the impatient Britten. Imo’s self-abnegation has limits here and she’s no doormat, suggesting improvements to the score that will never be credited, and giving as good as she gets in the last scene.
Whyman conducts the play as a balanced duet that brings Holst out of partial shadow into the spotlight. It’s staged around a grand piano, which is rapidly becoming the default central design motif for the Orange Tree’s in-the-round auditorium. There’s some unnecessary fussiness as the two actors rearrange a few other bits of mid-century furniture in scene changes accompanied by musical themes. Designer Soutra Gilmour neatly evokes the Suffolk coastal setting with a blue carpet meeting pebbles under the front row seats.
Gloriana was, as Britten predicted, a huge disaster. This play about its creation is a small gem.
Orange Tree Theatre, to May 17; orangetreetheatre.co.uk
