Erica Whyman, the RSC’s previous (acting) artistic director, makes her programming swansong at Stratford directing a play about a pair of artists who, in their different ways, were committed to the ideals that have motivated Whyman throughout her career (and are held dear by the company’s new co-artistic directors, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey): that the arts should be useful to society and be of benefit to all.
Mark Ravenhill’s two-hander, originally broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2013, is set in the work room of Benjamin Britten’s home in Aldeburgh, over nine months from 1952 to 1953, when the composer was anxiously working on Gloriana, a “British national opera” to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Under pressure, he has asked Imogen Holst to help him out. Imo has form as a facilitator: she is the daughter of Gustav, and a composer, arranger and educator in her own right.
Ravenhill gives glimpses of the protagonists’ hinterlands. There is talk of the Aldeburgh festival, which Britten set up in 1948 and Imogen Holst helped to run; of the then-new Arts Council, and the issue of what sort of art should public money be spent on (as relevant today as then); of Imo’s teaching at Dartington Hall, her community work (local children, trained by her, deliver an off-stage Christmas carol). The focus of the action, though, is the act of composition and the role played by creator and “assistant” in arriving at its completion.
Whyman’s sensitive direction plays to the strengths of the writing, the layerings of the characters, the liveliness of much of the dialogue. We get a powerful sense of the relationship between the two, with Samuel Barnett and Victoria Yeates delivering finely crafted performances, for the most part holding to just the right side of mannered.
What’s lacking for me, though, is dramatic drive and a sense of something beyond the particularity of this biographical snapshot. One such wider context, of the interrelation between nature and art, is pleasingly evoked by Soutra Gilmour’s design, centring on a grand piano in an almost empty space, enveloped in a soundscape of waves and wind (Carolyn Downing), punctuated by between-scenes piano music (Conor Mitchell, developed around two chords from the finished Gloriana).
• Ben and Imo is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 6 April
