What on earth is Britten’s Paul Bunyan? A satire on capitalism? A New World response to Soviet-style social realism? A Broadway musical manqué? Or the fever dream of two young artists let loose on a baffling slice of foreign folklore? In its first ever ENO production, it appears to be all these things and more, but it’s the fever dream that comes out top.
Britten and Auden, in the US to try to escape the war, originally thought they were writing a high-school operetta; but the 1941 premiere was given at Columbia University, and the work was withdrawn straight afterwards, re-emerging only in the 1970s. Auden’s libretto couches pointed passages in swaths of archness. Britten’s music assumes myriad stylistic guises, shrugging them on and off with seeming simplicity.
As a piece of music theatre, it’s barmy. How could it not be? Paul Bunyan is a giant superhuman lumberjack boss whose best friend is a blue ox. He is managing a dysfunctional logging team who are clearing the forest to make way for the American dream. He remains unseen, but his voice, piped into the theatre – here courtesy of Simon Russell Beale – dispenses godlike wisdom. On stage there are cats, a dog, three Norn-like geese, argumentative trees, and more singing lumberjacks than Monty Python. It’s a cross between The Cunning Little Vixen and a TUC meeting.
Happily, it’s just about entertaining enough to get away with all this. Jamie Manton’s staging, in designs by Camilla Clarke, uses every inch of Wilton’s. Matthew Kofi Waldren conducts with neat efficiency. ENO Studio Live productions showcase the chorus alongside a few emerging artists, here including soprano Rowan Pierce, touching as Bunyan’s daughter, and tenor Elgan Llyr Thomas, who belts out Johnny Inkslinger’s lonely aria as though he’s in the Coliseum, but who is clearly in possession of a classy voice. There’s a welcome spotlight thrown on many individual ENO choristers. Yet the real star is the chorus as a body. The sound they make in this tiny place is thrilling, and it’s they who turn what could be a mere collector’s item into something genuinely worthwhile.
- At Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 8 September.
