The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

THE GUARDIAN Thursday June 1 1995 THEATRE Andrew Clements questions Covent Garden's decision to stage the longer, four-act version of Britten's Billy Budd, and laments the production's lack of power The Are Ratears Riverside Studios Michael Billington tainly leaves you in no doubt as to the play's contemporary final conflagration, with its sulphurous sky and floating debris, suggests a war-ravaged city under siege. Malcolm Tierney's Biedermann also has the right rattled smugness, Frances de la Tour as his wife is nicely torn between private conscience and the bourgeois rules of hospitality and Cliff Parisi and Jonathan Barlow make a plausibly diabolical pair of Ore-raisers. But if you're going to play the ironic afterpiece, in which the senior devils close down Hell because Heaven refuses to let them have any major sinners, you need to make the action continuous. And, by the end, I found myself wishing that Frisch's highly important theme was accompanied by a matching dramatic complexity. I Until June 17.

detonating fuse, the more ingratiat ingly polite he becomes. Plagued by a mixture of guilt and fear, he literally cooks his goose by inviting the intruders to dinner and when, with sirens wailing, they ask him for matches he pliantly obliges. Each society finds in the play the message it wants: at different times it has been seen as an attack on communism and fascism though few people have noticed its parallels with Tar-tuffe in its savage portrayal of high-bourgeois credulity But while its theme remains eternally true in that we constantly appease the agents of our own destruction Frisch's treatment of it now seems stubbornly undramatic. By making Biedermann someone who connives so readily with his destroyers, Frisch plugs his point at the expense of opposing action. Lenka Udovicki's production cer YOU can see why Max Frisch's The Fire Raisers (1968) is being revived by Moving Theatre as part of their Riverside Studios season: it is clearly viewed as a prophetic play about the dangers of appeasing neo-fascism.

But while Frisch's message is horrendously timely its means of conveying it looks somewhat dated. Frisch's satiric fable is about a wealthy businessman who, as his town is being consumed by fire, welcomes a pair of palpable arsonists into his home. The more they pile up petrol drums in his attic and lay out the ILLY BUDD was Britten's contribution to the 1961 Festival of Britain, a commission for Covent Garden on a (SElD oofi Gte (jflifiBSlirix The result is a drama more clearly related to the grand opera tradition, and brings the most Verdian of Britten's works much closer to its model. That's a mixed blessing of all Brit ten's stage masterpieces Billy Budd is the one whose sound world seems the least distinctive and the most reliant upon nifty recycling of material from earlier works. But the original version also lays out the dramatic elements of the opera more clearly than the later, condensed one the reason for Captain Vere's wholesale support from his crew, and from Billy Budd in particular "I'll die for you Starry Vere" is spelt out in the first act finale, when Vere exhorts his men to Tight against the French, while the sheer blind ob-sessiveness of Claggart's hatred for Billy is underlined as he nags away at Vere for his support during the battle.

But while Britten's later version may leave more to inference than to exposition, it tightens the musical structure immeasurably for all its fulsome heroics the restored first-act finale is pretty four square, tub-thumping stuff. And in any case Billy Budd is an opera in which all the motivation, all the emotions are hidden beneath a veneer of black-and-white moral choice with a hint of Christian allegory thrown in as well. Claggart's desire to possess Billy's beauty and Vere's guilt tinged attrac grand-opera scale that enlisted Forster and Eric Crozier to prepare the libretto from Herman Melville's novella of life in the British Navy in the 1790s. With modifications that first production stayed in the repertory for more than 30 years. The Royal Opera's new production by Franceses Zam-bello, with designs by Alison Chitty.

hails from Geneva where it was first staged last year. Its arrival brings the history of Billy Budd at the Royal Opera House full circle, for it presents the work in the original four-act version that has not been seen in London since 1952. In I960 Britten had taken a blue pencil to his score, excised the first -act finale and made smaller cuts elsewhere to elide the opera into two big-boned acts with a single interval. That's the version that has become standard around the world, the one used for Britten's own 1966 recording and at the Coliseum for Tim Albery 's suffocatingly intense staging in 1968. Now all those cuts are opened out; even though there's still only one interval and the two pairs of acts are run together, all of Britten's music, and therefore his original architecture, is there.

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