Owen Wingrave

King’s Theatre 

3/5

Benjamin Britten’s rarely performed opera, based like his more famous The Turn Of The Screw on the Henry James 1892 novella, was composed for a television production in 1979.

The subject, a young man from a fiercely militaristic family whose total rejection of warfare leads to  tragedy — note the name Wingrave - leant itself to Britten’s equally resolute pacifism.

This is most potently expressed in the great War Requiem, also part of the thematic war focus of the festival.

Neil Bartlett, the director of this staged version, faced inevitable difficulties in translating the static intimacy demanded by the small screen to more expansive stage presentation.

He was also obviously determined to avoid a Victorian setting in order to bring home the stark contemporary impact of the work’s message. On a bare stage he employs four moveable flats, used both to focus attention and finally create the cursed room in which the hero mysteriously dies.

Ross Ramgobin’s Wingrave faces the combined forces of his family in the ancestral home beset by the memories of military heroes, most of whom met with general approval with their honourable, bloody end on the battlefield.

A group of these spirits, uniformed figures who constantly threaten him, support the vicious verbal attacks of the living including his dead fiancee.

It doesn’t quite work. The ghosts from the past look at times more like a group who have wandered in from the local barracks while Myfanwy Piper’s libretto occasionally achieves unintentional comic effects – “He looks almost jaunty. How dare he?”

Britten’s music however captures the false bravado of the martial and the sadness of the personal worlds. There is too the menace of the supernatural, as the childhood fears which have informed Wingrave's life cling on in the shape of a group of pyjama-clad boys he cannot ultimately shake off.

The audience's enthusiastic response, one felt, was not only for the well-crafted and impressive production but also down to a total acceptanceof the opera’s denunciation of war.

Gordon Parsons