When in 1952 Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a grand opera for the coronation of the young Queen and the supposed inauguration of a new Elizabethan Age, it was perhaps not the best idea to base it on her earlier namesake’s geriatric infatuation with the Earl of Essex.
The piece, Gloriana, met a predictably hostile reception at the time, but Mark Ravenhill’s penetrating play is not concerned so much with its musical merits as with the close but stormy relationship that developed during its writing between Britten and Imogen Holst, the independent-minded daughter of composer Gustav.
Ravenhill digs so deeply into the psyche of both characters, united in their musical passion, opposite in temperament, that the lines that emerge so fluently in their exchanges seem at times to write themselves.
Samuel Barnett is made to look so much like Britten, curly hair, ruled parting, that he might be carrying all the man’s music in that high forehead. Twitchy, depressive and petulant, he is emotionally both needy and fearful, demanding Imo’s affection then pushing her away. This musical genius comes across as a pathetic individual, but notwithstanding any allowance for that, the tirade of monstrous cruelty that he directs against Imo lands with shocking force.
Imo had come as his short-term musical assistant and was in fact to remain in Britten’s Aldeburgh for the rest of her life. Victoria Yeates captures her free spirit, gushing when Ben is taciturn, inclined to "overstep the mark awfully" but practical and pushing the despondent Ben to get things done. She is also eager to please, offering to dance a galliard for him as a model for one of the opera interludes. He receives the suggestion as if she had offered to swallow live frogs.
The gala performance of Gloriana, attended by the high and mighty rather than opera lovers, was not a success. The play stops short of that moment, but indicates what was to come when Britten and his singers played extracts at a private preview for the Queen and Prince Philip: "dull eyes, dull hearts, dull minds."
I found the whole play revelatory in terms of personality and also for what it revealed of composers’ lives, Imo’s father, ‘Gussie’ as she called him, having suffered similarly dark emotional periods. Ben sums it up: "people think composing is like being contained within great joy, but it’s a continual dull ache." Evidently, it could be painful for the composer’s assistant too.