A beautiful sailor walks onto a ship. Jealousy puts a noose around his neck.
The premiere of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd in Madrid is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the Teatro Real's bicentennial celebrations. Its magnificent libretto, based on the novel of the same name by Herman Melville, tells the story of the sailor Billy Budd: a handsome, loyal, generous, strong, naive, and kind young man whose beauty and personality drive the ship's master-at-arms mad. Unable to control the situation, the master crucifies the naive young man without mercy. This new production by the Teatro Real is being presented for the first time in Madrid, in co-production with the Opéra national de Paris, under the direction of Deborah Warner, one of the great names in stage direction today.
Direction
Deborah Warner's staging turns the ship into a psychological pressure cooker.
Acting
Imbrailo's Billy radiates doomed goodness; Sherratt's Claggart simmers with self-loathing.
Score
Britten's orchestra groans and shimmers like the sea itself.
Director
Jérémie Cuvillier
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Britten wrote this during 1950s Britain's persecution of gay men, encoding queer desire into Claggart's impossible attraction to Billy. The subtext isn't subtle if you know where to look.
Melville left his novella unfinished at his death; Britten and librettist E.M. Forster invented Vere's framing device, making him an unreliable narrator haunted by guilt.
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