When Elizabeth II became Queen in 1952, composer Benjamin Britten (Samuel Barnett) was commissioned to write a grand opera to be premiered as part of the Coronation celebrations. With only 9 months to do it in, he was forced to take on a musical assistant, something he agreed to only if he could hire his friend Imogen Holst (Victoria Yeates,) who had fulfilled a similar role for her late father Gustav. Mark Ravenhill's
Ben and Imo, originally seen at the RSC last year, is a fictional imagining of their personal and professional relationship as they worked on
Gloriana, an opera about Elizabeth I in honour of her sequel. The two-hander is an uneven but often interesting look at the toxic behaviour of genius - a common theme of American drama, but here given the twist of a very British type of toxicity.
