Clayton's Vere anchors Grandage's Billy Budd revival
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- Michael Grandage's Billy Budd revival, now directed by Ian Rutherford, returns with its Glyndebourne-era staging on Christopher Oram's brutalist grey, curved-deck HMS Indomitable set that gives the male chorus a 'palpable' erotic and violent charge.
- Allan Clayton's Captain Vere is the production's anchor: a luminous, sensitive tenor that shifts 'first as the voice of reason, then of conscience,' culminating in a final solo scene — wig discarded — the reviewer calls 'quietly devastating' and 'an intimate portrait of human vulnerability.'
- Thomas Mole's Billy Budd swings across the stage 'lithe as a gymnast,' his burnished, double-speed wittering contrasting with Sam Carl's muddier, ferocious bass-baritone Claggart in performances the reviewer calls persuasive but ultimately absorbed into the chorus's larger male panoply.
- The London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Carter, 'rolled and surged beneath the action, seductive or brutal as the situation demanded,' with supporting turns from Clive Bayley's warmly sympathetic Dansker and Laurence Kilsby's skin-crawling Novice.
- The staging materializes the opera's repressed homosexual subtext — Forster's libretto called Claggart's malevolence a 'sexual discharge gone evil' — most pointedly in a scene where Claggart bullies the Novice in 'a chokehold that is simultaneously, unmistakably an embrace.'
Why it matters: The reviewer's central thesis — that Billy Budd's moral weight hinges on Captain Vere — is borne out by Clayton's stillness carrying the production's emotional fulcrum. For a 14-year-old Glyndebourne staging to read this fresh in revival, Rutherford's direction had to let one performance lead; the reviewer confirms it does.
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