BILLY BUDD • LYON OPERA FESTIVAL
★★★★★☆
REVIEW BILLY BUDD: FORBIDDEN FASCINATION IN A STORMINGLY BEAUTIFUL PRODUCTION
The affable French director and opera director Richard Brunel is usually inclined toward radical interpretations, but here he focuses on clarity and coherence in the Lyon Opera Festival’s production of Benjamin Britten’s tragic Billy Budd. The result is a gripping opera experience, presented in a spectacularly beautiful staging.
In its two-act version from the 1960s, the work is as close to a fully realized homoerotic opera as one can get. Today, Billy Budd is considered one of Britten’s strongest works and a key opera in queer art history.
The story takes place on a British warship in the 1790s, where the young sailor Billy is forced into service. His extraordinary, striking beauty exerts a dangerous fascination on both the crew and the officers. Fatal attraction and jealousy lead to his downfall in a mix of duty, guilt, and powerlessness.
His radiant, pure, almost Christ-like appearance makes him both an object of worship and destructive passion. A young, beautiful, and morally unblemished man who is killed by “the system.”
The set design is dazzlingly beautiful: enormous scaffolding structures resembling the cross-section of a British warship, sailing around one another in a spectacular design of light and smoke effects.
The opera opens with a prologue in a foggy haze, where Captain Vere revisits his despairing past. The plot thus unfolds as one long flashback, but the drama is not diminished by the fact that we know from the very first moment that Billy is a dead man when he steps aboard.
As in several of Britten’s works, the theme revolves around the innocent outsider. Billy is guilty of nothing more than being a good guy, a skilled sailor, and a comrade who attracts a forbidden homoerotic interest from those around him.
The opera’s villain is the ship’s “security chief,” Officer Claggart, who develops an obsession with Billy and reveals the dark side of desire—a mixture of lust, hatred, and self-loathing. To rid himself of his sinful fantasies, he attempts to have Billy convicted of premeditated mutiny, a charge that could get him hanged.
When Billy is confronted with the false accusation, his speech impediment plays a tragic trick on him. He stutters when pressed and cannot utter a word in his defense. Instead, he lets his fists do the talking: Billy knocks Claggart out with a single blow—and kills him.
The isolated male world at sea creates a pressure cooker of raw masculinity, where desire, authority, and violence merge. Remarkably, there are exactly zero women in this opera. Billy is brought before a court-martial, where Captain Vere is reluctantly forced to sentence him to death.
Billy Budd is very much an ensemble work, in which the chorus in particular plays an enormous role. In Lyon, the tension in Britten’s score is conveyed with impressive dramatic intensity: swirling storms, lightning, cannon fire, and massive choral scenes—enhanced by lingering moments of profound poetry.
Sean Michael Plumb is an outstanding Billy with great vocal power and stage presence. Derek Welton is an icy Claggart, an institutional evil with clear references to Scarpia in Tosca. Paul Appleby sings Captain Vere with great empathy and high quality—a broken man who reenacts his own guilt as a moral trial amidst the fog.
Five stars from GOT TO SEE THIS for a powerful experience in Lyon: An opera house well worth keeping a close eye on.
