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As a teenager in a girls’ choir I rarely had the opportunity to sing works by female composers, but there was one exception. A setting of words from a John Donne sermon, it never failed to thrill with its unexpected turns and discords and a crashing final note. Its composer, Imogen Holst, had a famous name but seemed otherwise unknown.
The reticence was clearly her choice. Mark Ravenhill’s two-hander Ben and Imo, about Holst’s collaboration with Benjamin Britten as he struggled to complete his 1953 opera Gloriana, underlines her brilliance and also her willingness to subsume it into the work of others.
Britten, England’s most feted composer after the success of Peter Grimes, has nine months to complete the opera in time for a gala to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II. But he is in a creative funk, and there are already official doubts about the suitability of a libretto about an ageing queen infatuated with a young lord. Holst, having experience of genius with her late father Gustav, the fondly named “Gussie”, impulsively ditches her teaching job at Dartington Hall and relocates to the stormy Suffolk coast to help out.
Director Erica Whyman makes the town of Aldeburgh almost a third character, with its howling winds and heavy seas; the living-room set (Soutra Gilmour) is perched on shingle, with a bare back wall representing the endless horizon. Imo, whirling in like Mary Poppins with a carpet bag, is a self-proclaimed “gypsy” with no ties and few possessions. They are wildly contrasting types; Samuel Barnett as Ben sits primly, knees and feet together, hands clenched, while Victoria Yeates’s Imo dashes and chivvies, clutches a score, claims a hug. The grand piano, circling on the revolve, is the centre of this musical maelstrom.
Collaboration is easier to represent on stage than the internality of creativity. Imo flings ideas, suggests phrases and stagings, waves books and marks up scores, to Ben’s irritation and eventual grudging acceptance. The play flags slightly at these moments but, handily, Imo also brings impish fun. The cocktail cabinet gets heavy usage. Yeates and Barnett have a vivid rapport, bringing to life this intense, non-sexual relationship. The adored Peter Pears (Britten’s partner) is an offstage presence, but Imo has her own sexiness, dancing like a madcap and revealing that she once posed for nude photos.
The themes are timely with a recent coronation and the opportunity we now have to assess the second Elizabethan age. Since Gloriana is an official, taxpayer-funded initiative, with all the demands that brings, Ravenhill also makes sly swipes at Arts Council functionaries and government funding cuts for the arts. The pair cuss like seadogs, bitching about Ninette de Valois, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frederick Ashton, with Barnett roaring the very Ravenhillian line: “Fuck Kenneth Clark!”
Ravenhill allows himself some foreshadowing, with Imo predicting the critical failure of Gloriana and pushing on Ben a copy of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. There’s a somewhat confected row at the close, where Ben accepts his essential cruelty: that he will take what he needs, plus all the credit, and push her away. But flighty Imo stayed on in Aldeburgh for the rest of her life, and she, Britten and Pears rest there to this day.
★★★★☆
Orange Tree Theatre, to May 17, orangetreetheatre.co.uk
This review was originally published during the play’s debut in Stratford-upon-Avon, March-April 2024
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