[title]
‘A libretto is complicated,’ says Benjamin Britten. ‘If I’m honest I’m not sure either of us is up to it’. In response, WH Auden falls slowly backwards into a bath filled with chilling wine bottles and tosses an ice cube into his mouth.
Zoe Lewis’s new play reimagines one of the most outré house-shares in history. For a troubled spell in 1940, celebrated English composer Britten lived in a rundown Brooklyn townhouse with poet Auden, budding great American novelist Carson McCullers and celebrity striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. Christopher Isherwood would pop in for dinner. Surrealist painters would improvise on the walls. Think Spareroom.com operated exclusively for bohemians.
You can imagine ‘Britten in Brooklyn’ pitched as a TV series in the vein of ‘Desperate Romantics’. There’s plenty of comedy to be wrung from tortured artists trying to co-habit, and designer Cecelia Carey certainly makes the most of it. Ryan Sampson’s boyishly handsome, fastidious Britten plays a grand piano that doubles as a drinks cabinet and a noticeboard for an abandoned rota. Wilton’s Music Hall adds to the impression of stylish dilapidation.
But while the housemates play parlour games and cane it through creative block, the world is going to war. John Hollingworth’s bullish Auden preaches conscientious objection and tries to bust Britten out of the sexual closet. But the composer, ‘doubly hated’ back home, is increasingly conflicted. When a mysterious army man pays them a visit, it all goes a bit ‘An Inspector Calls’.
The tone of Oli Rose’s production lurches like Ruby Bentall’s wonderfully tomboyish Carson after another bottle of red. Lewis can’t quite balance Britten’s sincere personal soul-searching (including clunky flashbacks to his mother’s death) with the comic self-absorption of the wider set. Ironically, it’s Sadie Frost’s Gypsy Rose Lee who emerges, slightly shakily, as the moral ballast. ‘I don’t understand,’ she coos, ‘why you icons of literature are so disinterested in the future of the human race’.