Britten: Gloriana - Opera North/Daniel (Opus Arte)

Imagine that the BBC have asked you to make a film of your highly successful opera production. There are a number of approaches you might take. You could point cameras at the stage in time-honoured BBC fashion and record it from beginning to end. This has preserved some great performances for posterity but it rarely captures the excitement of a live show. You could make a behind-the-scenes documentary or you might go all out to film it free from the confines of the original staging.

Phyllida Lloyd, who was given this commission for a film based on her Opera North production of Britten's Gloriana, opted for a combination of all of these techniques. She was told to keep it to just 100 minutes. This meant cutting the opera from its usual running time of about 150 minutes. Lost are the masque scene from Act 2, the plotting of Mountjoy and Penelope and the street scene from Act 3. What the film focuses on, then, is the intense relationship between Elizabeth and Essex.

The viewer gets a good idea of what it was like on stage. Some scenes are filmed in a theatre in front of an audience and others (the intimate ones between the main protagonists) in a studio. The switch between locations isn't always seamless but, in both cases, it is filmed artfully and imaginatively. The sets and costumes are striking and much of it is very beautiful.

The backstage scenes are not quite so successful. Lloyd speaks in the accompanying documentary of the difficulty of getting wardrobe staff to act. The acting of the principals is hardly more convincing, as they rather self-consciously play themselves. It's all highly-staged and contrived. Lloyd is making some point about the public and private faces of the characters, which is a major theme of the work, but it's slightly confusing and rather phoney.

Nevertheless, this is an excellent version of Britten's opera with very strong performances throughout. Tom Randle as Essex is particularly impressive, as is Josephine Barstow as the Queen, although I find her a little strident at times. Paul Daniel leads the English Northern Philharmonia in an exciting account of the score. If the director's playing with techniques doesn't wholly convince, it's a very watchable alternative to the usual staid and stagey approach to filming opera.

There is a 37 minute documentary as extra feature, although unaccountably it has been split into 4 different parts entitled Gloriana at Opera North, Elizabeth and Essex, The Idea of the Film and Gloriana, a Film. I'd have thought that most viewers would be able to take this in one go, rather than in short bites. A sign of the times perhaps.

As for the opera, I hope that all talk of Gloriana being an inferior work is now dead. Antagonism to it in the past seems to have centred around the fact that Britten wrote a proper opera, rather than a fawning pageant celebrating the coronation of the new queen in 1953. Instead of showing an energetic young monarch leading her troops to glory, which some might find more fitting to mark the occasion, he and librettist William Plomer portrayed a decrepit old queen failing to keep control of the conflict between her private and public lives. Phyllida Lloyd seems justified, therefore, in saying that the opera resonated particularly strongly with audiences in the early 21st Century.

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