Theatre

Ben and Imo

Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond

5/5

Exquisite duet

Mark Ravenhill has written a remarkable play based on the friendship between the composers Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst with fascinating dialogue between the two strong complementary personalities. They spar, support and abuse each other and gradually create an interdependency. It is rare to encounter a play about friendship between a man and a woman, particularly one so accomplished.

Imo wants to be involved in music creation and to be free, Ben wants to be revered and successful. Ben is moody and bitchy, Imo exuberant and positive. Furthermore they are torn by different internal conflicts. Imo fears losing her freedom, and yet she is often ready to sacrifice it to music. Ben can’t help using people whom he genuinely likes to achieve success and resents himself for not knowing how to be kind to them once they have outlived their usefulness. They join forces to produce Gloriana, an opera to commemorate the coronation of Elizabeth II. The music is of course Benjamin Britten’s, but Imogen Holst has considerable input.

From the beginning Imo want clarity about what her role is in the project. They settle on ‘music assistant’, although Imo is so much more than that. She is a confidante, emotional support, more importantly first listener and critic, a fellow composer who genuinely understands and admires Ben’s creation, a friend, but as a woman in 1950s also someone who gets used to mop up here and there without making a fuss. Imogen is the daughter of Gustav Holst, so she is very familiar with being a willing slave to a musical genius.

The piano is centre stage and everything revolves around it. Admirably music is used with restraint, mostly as an accent, and most often it is not Britten’s but Elizabethan. There are short snippets of piano playing skilfully enacted to obscure the fact that the actors are not themselves playing. More poignantly we hear the atmospheric waves from the Aldeburgh beach.

It’s wonderful that the play is completely derisory about the royal family throughout. Even though Gloriana is created for the Queen, she is completely unimportant for its creation except for the pressure to produce a masterpiece, which will inevitably be ignored by the royals in their disdain for the arts.

This Royal Shakespeare Company production effortlessly and intuitively directed by Erica Whyman was premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2024. Interestingly the text was originally a radio play written for BBC Radio 3 in 2013 for Britten’s centenary and the focus on the voice and sound remains a feature, although now beautifully supplemented by great physical presence and acting of the two leads Samuel Barnett and Victoria Yeates. The sparse 50s set and costumes do not weigh down the action but give it an additional flavour of the era.

Ben’s outburst of bile in the second half sends us all reeling with this new understanding of his personality. This moment is the climax of the piece when we finally reach a fuller understanding of the emotional interplay between the characters. They remain friends. And in reality, Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst remained friends till the end of their lives. She spent the rest of her life living in Aldeburgh where she originally came to help Ben.

The evening passes quickly with the two characters, beautifully inhabited by the actors. There is some physical resemblance as well helped by the adapted hairstyles, or perhaps it is just simply great acting and you forget they are not Ben and Imo.